data centers

Co-ops were early adopters of AMR (automated meter reading) and AMI (advanced metering infrastructure), which automate tasks as mundane as reading a meter or finding the location of an outage. In a big city, that might take a few minutes for a utility crew, but co-op crews might have to drive for a couple of hours to do the same thing. If technology can eliminate that two-hour trip, it’s safer for employees, minimizes outage times, and saves members money.

We all live by rules. Rules help keep society orderly. They protect individual rights, and they give families and businesses a fair basis for planning. We make better decisions when we understand the rules and can trust they’re not going to change without warning. The same is true at your local electric cooperative.

When big changes come very quickly, often with little or no information that’s easily accessible, neighbors tend to react with suspicion and sometimes even anger. Residents of towns like Trenton, in Butler County, and South Bloomfield, in Pickaway County, have crowded local zoning boards, signed petitions, and generally begun pushing back against data centers planned in those communities. In fact, at least 30 Ohio municipalities have enacted or are considering enacting moratoriums on new data centers.

And that raises a question: What’s the big deal?

As the electric industry settles into the new reality that comes with serving the power needs of large data centers, generators, including Buckeye Power, must balance reliability and cost when considering new generating resources. 

Data centers may feel like a big-city phenomenon, but more and more of them are showing up in rural communities like ours — and there’s good reason for that. Rural areas offer what data centers need most: affordable land, room to grow, and access to transmission lines that can move large amounts of power.