Ohio's utility consumer advocate says local grid spending that has never faced a cost-effectiveness review has now topped $10 billion, and she wants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to finally act on a complaint she filed nearly three years ago. The Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel filed a motion for expedited action last Thursday, asking FERC to either grant that 2023 complaint outright or set up a faster process to resolve it.
Maureen Willis, who leads the state's Consumers' Counsel, put it bluntly in the filing: Ohio consumers should not be asked to provide a blank check for billions of dollars in transmission spending without meaningful regulatory review, according to Cleveland.com. Willis said the complaint has been pending at FERC for nearly three years while additional transmission projects keep getting added to the pile, the outlet reports. Cleveland.com's report, credited to reporter Anna Staver, forms the backbone of what's driving this latest push.
A Regulatory Gap Utilities Can Drive Trucks Through
The dispute centers on what are known as supplemental transmission projects, smaller-scale local buildouts that individual utilities propose largely on their own initiative. Unlike major regional transmission projects, which face competitive bidding and cost-benefit reviews, these supplemental projects skip that scrutiny entirely. Per the Cleveland.com account, PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, only checks whether such projects might cause reliability problems elsewhere on the grid — not whether they are needed or worth the cost. Neither FERC nor the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio reviews that question either, the newspaper's reporting states.
That gap matters because utilities earn a regulated percentage of profit on transmission construction, giving them a built-in financial incentive to build, according to the Consumers' Counsel's filing as described in the same report. Consumer advocates worry utilities have an incentive to construct more transmission infrastructure than is actually necessary. The Ohio Consumers' Counsel first raised this alarm in 2023, identifying more than $6 billion in supplemental transmission projects that had proceeded without the review advocates say should apply.
The Numbers Have Kept Climbing
Since that original complaint, the figures have only grown. Ohio utilities proposed roughly $1.9 billion in supplemental transmission projects in a single year, 2024, according to the Consumers' Counsel's tally as reported by Cleveland.com, and the total has since climbed past the $10 billion mark statewide. A separate accounting from Mgrid.org puts the scale in similar terms, finding Ohio utilities added roughly $6.5 billion in PJM-approved supplemental transmission projects to state plans between 2017 and 2026 without state or federal review of cost-effectiveness or necessity. Both figures describe the same underlying gap: spending that clears PJM's reliability check but never gets weighed against whether it's actually worth the money.
Much of that spending appears tied to the arrival of massive data centers built by companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google, all of which own large-load facilities driving new demand onto Ohio's grid, per the Consumers' Counsel filing cited by Cleveland.com. Elsewhere in the state, Duke Energy proposed $36.2 million in transmission work for a single customer expanding demand from 15 to 500 megawatts near Trenton, while AEP proposed $156 million in transmission projects to serve 800 megawatts of new demand, according to a report cited on the Ohio subreddit that traces back to Cleveland.com's own transmission coverage. Those are the kinds of individual projects that never see a cost-benefit review under current rules.
Data Center Demand Dwarfs the Grid's Old Peak
The scale of that demand has become almost unrecognizable next to the grid's history. AEP Ohio told state regulators in February that data center developers had signed binding contracts for 5,642 megawatts under its new Data Center Tariff, pushing total contracted data center load to 17,861 megawatts — well above the utility's historical peak demand of 8,000 to 10,500 megawatts. Clean energy research group RMI has documented the same pattern across the wider PJM grid, finding that spending on supplemental transmission projects expanded 26-fold from 2009 to 2023, with the average annual number of expected supplemental projects up more than 1,000%.
Residential customers are already feeling the squeeze in their monthly bills. AEP Ohio raised its non-bypassable Basic Transmission Cost Rider from 3.6 cents to 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour in April, adding roughly $7.90 a month to the average household's electric bill to help pay for transmission infrastructure, according to Stop Ohio Data Centers. That increase lands atop a broader affordability crunch Hoodline previously reported, in which regulated Ohio utilities executed nearly 345,000 power disconnections for nonpayment between June 2025 and May 2026, with AEP Ohio disconnecting roughly 15% of its own customer base.
Lawmakers and Regulators Are Already Circling
Willis has also taken the fight to the Statehouse. In June testimony on House Bill 706, she urged lawmakers to set strict cost-causation rules preventing utilities from shifting data center grid costs onto residential customers, building on House Bill 15's streamlined permitting process passed in August 2025. That legislative push follows a costly reminder of what happens when oversight fails: in January, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved a $276 million settlement tied to FirstEnergy's role in the House Bill 6 bribery scandal, delivering $249 million in direct customer refunds and $20 million for low-income utility assistance.
The Ohio complaint also isn't happening in isolation. FERC issued Section 206 show-cause orders to PJM in June, demanding the grid operator justify or reform its large-load connection rules within 60 days to protect existing ratepayers from cost-shifting, a move Hoodline covered as part of a federal PJM shakeup effort. Because PJM's footprint spans 13 states, a ruling in Ohio's favor on supplemental project oversight could set a precedent well beyond the state's borders. For now, Willis and her office are simply asking federal regulators to stop letting the question sit unanswered while the bills keep climbing.
