Ohio watchdog pushes for oversight of $10 billion in utility spending

NewsAs Ohioans face rising electric bills, their utility consumer advocate, the Ohio Consumers' Counsel, is again pushing for oversight of billions in transmission projects.The Plain DealerCOLUMBUS--As Ohioans face rising electric bills, their utility consumer advocate is again pushing for oversight of billions in transmission projects.“Ohio consumers should not be asked to provide a blank check for billions of dollars in transmission spending without meaningful regulatory review,” Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis said in a statement.Transmission is the highway system of the electric grid. High-voltage lines and substations move large amounts of power from where it is generated to the local systems that deliver it to homes and businesses.But consumer advocates have long worried that utilities have an incentive to build more than necessary because they earn a regulated percentage of profit off that construction. Basically, the more they spend, the more money they earn.Related: Who pays for new transmission lines to power data centers? Often, you doLarger regional projects face cost reviews and competitive bidding meant to keep spending in check. But no such oversight exists for supplemental projects, which are localized to a single utility company in a single state. OCC first complained about that gap to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2023. At the time, it identified more than $6 billion in projects that had gone forward without that review. The total has since topped $10 billion.“The cost of delay is not theoretical,” according to the filing. “While OCC’s complaint has languished before FERC, supplemental projects have continued to proliferate.”Cleveland.com recently analyzed how these lightly regulated construction projects are being used to build out the electric grid for data centers.Ohio utilities proposed $1.9 billion in supplemental transmission projects in 2024, and $1.3 billion of it appeared to be for data centers. “These local transmission and supplemental project needs have ballooned in part to interconnect and accommodate the massive energy demands of large load data centers owned by some of the world’s wealthiest companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Google,” according to OCC’s filing. “Absent FERC action, Ohio consumers will continue to pay these costs.”FERC doesn’t review these local projects to decide whether they are needed or cost-effective, and the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio doesn’t review those questions either.PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, does review the projects, but only to ensure they won’t create reliability problems elsewhere on the system. OCC is now asking FERC to either grant its 2023 complaint or create an expedited process to resolve it.“OCC’s consumer-protection complaint has been collecting dust at FERC for nearly three years while billions more in transmission projects continue to be added,” Willis said.As a statehouse reporter for Cleveland.com, I write about all things Ohio politics with a focus on elections, marijuana policy, social issues, budgets, redistricting, public pensions, immigration in Ohio and...