Ohioans could soon see prices at the pump fall temporarily after state lawmakers passed a 90-day pause of the state’s gas tax on Wednesday.

The Ohio House and Senate passed House Bill 519 on Wednesday in a pair of bipartisan votes. The bill will suspend Ohio’s assessment of its 38.5-cent-per-gallon tax on gas and its 47-cent-per-gallon tax on diesel. The bill also pulls $725 million out of the state’s reserve accounts to cover the lost road and bridge maintenance funding that will occur as a result of the tax holiday.

The bill now heads to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk for his signature. Normally, laws take effect 90 days after they are passed. But the gas-tax bill will take effect immediately if and when DeWine signs it, since it got enough Democratic support to add what’s called an emergency clause. 

Last week, DeWine voiced skepticism about an earlier version of how to fund the tax break. But now that it’s funded via general budget dollars and not those earmarked specifically for road repairs and construction, DeWine plans to sign the bill, his spokesman said on Wednesday afternoon. 

Ramaswamy revives stalled tax holiday idea

Republicans have debated suspending the state’s gas tax since earlier this year, after the U.S. attacks on Iran in February. This led to a disruption in global oil shipping and a spike in gas prices. But the measure failed to advance. Legislative leaders said Wednesday some Republicans thought at the time that perhaps prices had spiked temporarily. 

But the idea landed on the Republican-controlled legislature’s front burner last week after it became a top issue in the governor’s race. 

Nine days before Wednesday’s vote, both gubernatorial candidates – Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton – called for passage of a gas tax holiday within hours of one another. 

The same day, Midwest diesel prices reached an all-time high of $6.68 a gallon while regular gas prices reached their highest levels since May, according to federal data. Republicans’ polling numbers, meanwhile, have plunged as gas prices have started to go up.

Republican legislative leaders heeded the call, calling members back to Columbus on Wednesday for an unexpected vote. The resulting legislation was added to an unrelated bill that previously had to do with deterring auto theft. 

At times the legislative process grew contentious. Senate Republicans invoked a rarely used procedural maneuver to squash debate on the bill and block Democrats from proposing amendments on unrelated, politically charged subjects. And in the House, GOP Speaker Matt Huffman repeatedly cautioned Democrats that their floor speeches could be cut off if they deviated too far from the bill.

“We tried to offer amendments. Obviously, they won’t let us,” said Rep. Munira Abdullahi, a Columbus Democrat.

Republican Senate President Rob McColley, Ramaswamy’s running mate, described the restrictions as needed to keep debate on the topic.

“If we would have gotten bogged down with a lot of other stuff solely for political theater …, it would have, quite frankly, been a disservice to Ohioans,” McColley said.

The idea to suspend gas taxes was dusted off and then passed within nine days – a breakneck pace by typical legislative standards. Speaking with reporters following the vote, Ramaswamy called the episode a preview of how he’d govern the state.

“We’re going to be focused. We’re going to be substantive. And we’re going to be fast,” Ramaswamy said.

Tax holiday splits Democrats

Democrats took two major tacks on Wednesday when it came to the gas tax holiday legislation. Regardless of how they voted, most said in floor speeches and in interviews that they believed between 30% and 60% of the savings would not be passed on to customers and instead stay with the oil and gas industry or retailers. 

Those who voted for the bill credited Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton for helping come up with the idea, since Acton called for her own gas tax holiday hours before Ramaswamy did. After the bill passed Wednesday, the Acton campaign released a statement praising the vote’s outcome.

“As the first candidate in this race to propose a gas tax holiday, Dr. Acton is glad the Statehouse has voted with bipartisan support to establish a gas tax holiday and provide Ohioans much needed relief at the pump,” the statement said.

Some Democrats also quibbled with aspects of the bill, criticizing it for not dealing with broader issues like property taxes or data centers, or for pulling from state reserve funds instead using $600 million the state previously agreed to use to build a new Cleveland Browns football stadium.

Other Democrats more critical of the Republican proposal called the tax holiday a gimmick that would only save Ohioans a few dollars while politically benefitting Ramaswamy and other Republicans ahead of the election. They also said it ignores the real culprit of surging gas prices – the U.S. war on Iran. 

“This is a stunt,” said state Rep. Allison Russo, who’s also the Democratic candidate for Ohio Secretary of State. “It’s a stunt because you’re worried about what’s going to happen in 35 days.”

Rep. Terrence Upchurch, a Cleveland Democrat, said in an interview he’s confident he can explain what looks like a tough vote against the always-popular idea of a tax break. 

“This is temporary relief, there are no guardrails for consumers, and this is just irresponsible,” he said. 

Still, enough Democrats voted for the bill to hand Republicans a crucial victory – to attach the emergency clause that allows the law to take effect immediately, which could lead to a drop in gas prices before early voting starts on Oct. 6.

Some Democrats described their belief that Acton’s team wanted the bill to pass and urged Democratic caucus leaders to vote for it. 

“A lot of Democrats are a  frustrated ‘yes,’” said Abdullahi, who voted no. 

Dani Isaacsohn, the House Democratic Minority Leader, told reporters Wednesday that he spoke to Acton about the gas tax holiday proposal “at length.” He then laid out the sequence of events – Acton’s proposal followed by Ramaswamy’s legislative push hours later.

“She is centering the relief that people need, and she recognizes even before she’s in office that it’s time to start taking people’s needs seriously,” Isaacsohn said. 

This story originally appeared at signalohio.com.

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From the moment he claimed victory in the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary, Vivek Ramaswamy has built a campaign in part around a critique of his opponent’s leadership of the state’s COVID-19 response. 

The case has mostly focused on Ohio’s decisions early in the pandemic – led by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, a physician who’s now running for governor as a Democrat – to close schools and businesses in the spring of 2020. 

Ramaswamy and the state Republican party have sought to ferry some of the lingering frustration and cynicism around COVID-19 into a race against an opponent they refer to as “Dr. Lockdown” or “Ohio’s Fauci,” a reference to longtime federal infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advised President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden during the pandemic and is now a frequent punching bag and apparent criminal investigation subject of Republicans. 

The state GOP has been more unsparing, accusing Acton of “recklessness dressed up in authority” and “a record marked by unconstitutional overreach, preventable suffering, and lasting damage” to Ohio families. 

“Those kids in public schools will never get those two years of their education back. That’s unforgivable,” Ramaswamy said in a victory speech in May after a blowout primary victory. 

“Businesses were shuttered, and we actually chased business and entrepreneurs to states like Florida or Texas.”

But a review of state health orders shows Ohio’s pandemic response wasn’t all that different from that of pandemic “freedom” states like Texas and Florida through the entirety of Acton’s leadership of the health department during the pandemic. 

For instance, Ohio closed its K-12 schools in the Spring of 2020 on the same day as Florida. Also, while Texas and Florida were quicker to re-open restaurants, Ohio was quicker to re-open its first bars. 

Acton led the Ohio Department of Health for the first 94 days of the pandemic before she resigned June 11, 2020. In that time, Ohio acted more or less with comparable timing with dozens of states, Democrat and Republican, largely adhering to CDC guidance under the Trump administration in responding to what was then an emerging and novel health crisis. Ultimately, millions of Ohioans were infected during the pandemic, and more than 42,000 died.

“All the states were doing this,” said Sharona Hoffman, a co-director at the law and medicine center at Case Western Reserve University’s law school. “We were not anomalous in any way. Texas and Florida were doing the same thing. … It had nothing to do with Amy Acton.”

Republicans have criticized Acton for taking comparatively common steps to respond to the pandemic, and glossing over their Republican backing. For instance, some have castigated Acton for issuing a late-breaking order delaying the March 2020 primary election. But Ohio was one of at least 16 states to delay its primaries. And the order only came after a lawsuit on behalf of immunocompromised voters seeking to do the same, organized by statewide Republicans including DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, failed.  

Like other Republicans, Ramaswamy has distanced himself from things like his personal decision to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or his self-identification as an “adviser” to the state’s pandemic response. As recently as Saturday, he referred to Acton as a “bureaucrat who shut down our economy [and] who will do it again” if given the chance. 

The criticism comes despite insistence from DeWine, also a Republican, that the life-or-death policy choices of the day were his. 

While most health orders were signed by Acton – state law vests power in the health department director – Acton and DeWine rolled them out jointly at the daily pandemic-era press conferences that vaulted Acton to prominence. 

“The decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don’t like it,” DeWine said recently. “The buck stops with me.”

Ramaswamy’s campaign declined to make the candidate available for an interview or answer questions on the subject of COVID-19. 

Acton’s campaign also declined an interview, emphasizing that DeWine has taken ownership of pandemic-era decisions and that Ohio acted in similar fashion as most states. 

“Dr. Acton is proud of the work she did alongside Governor Mike DeWine to put public health over politics, save lives, and keep Ohioans safe,” said Addie Bullock, an Acton spokeswoman. “Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy made more than $2 billion from the COVID-19 vaccine, wanted to ‘segregate’ Ohioans based on their immunity status, and spent over $70,000 lobbying the federal government and White House on COVID drug approvals.”

Ohio, Florida and (most) California schools closed on the same day

On March 12, 2020, DeWine announced that Ohio would be the first state in the nation to close all public schools, effective March 16. 

The decision proved to be a watershed moment. Within 24 hours, dozens of states followed. These included ruby red political grounds of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Utah and West Virginia. 

While Ramaswamy’s campaign regularly and correctly points out that Ohio was the first to “announce” a statewide closure, most states closed schools around the same time. 

Ohio and Florida both closed March 16, 2020, a Monday. California didn’t issue any statewide school closure at the time, but by that same day, districts enrolling 90% of California students had closed on their own accord. Texas schools were ordered to close that Friday. 

When lawmakers convened for the first time during the pandemic later that month, the Ohio General Assembly didn’t at all reverse Acton’s decision. Instead, lawmakers voted to relieve schools of certain testing and reporting requirements given the shutdowns.

The bill passed unanimously, including with a vote from Sen. Rob McColley, a northwest Ohio Republican who is now Ramaswamy’s running mate. 

States varied widely on contentious decisions around handling the 2020-2021 school year. In general terms, Republican states pushed more aggressively for open classrooms, while Democrats sought remote learning options. But these debates occurred well after Acton left and under a new state health director. 

Ohio’s bar shutdown? Shorter than sunny Texas’

Ohio closed its bars and restaurants March 15, 2020, in one of the most visceral intrusions into adults’ lives during the pandemic at the time. 

California, Florida and Texas’ bars and restaurants were all shuttered by March 20. 

In the bitter decisions over re-opening the economy, Ohio sat reliably mid-pack throughout. Restaurants re-opened outdoors on May 15, 2020, with some bars almost immediately drawing dense crowds that stirred unease in state officials. Indoor dining resumed six days later. That’s 61 and 67 days, respectively. 

Florida – its tourist towns in the midst of spring break – reopened its restaurants on May 1, 2020, and its bars June 5. That means its restaurants closed for 42 days and its bars for 81. 

Texas reopened restaurants on May 4, 2020, at between 25% and 50% capacity, and opened bars on May 22 that year. So Texas restaurants were closed for 42 days and bars for 64. 

The timeline is messier than partisan politics suggest. Florida and Texas were more aggressive opening restaurants than Ohio was, while more cautious with their bars. 

Ohio declined a mask mandate under Acton

Conservatives have repeatedly sought to connect Acton with pandemic-era, robin’s egg-blue cloth masks – a visceral symbol of one of the most unpopular elements of the pandemic among conservatives. 

But Ohio under Acton spurned a torrent of roughly two dozen progressive states that began imposing statewide mask mandates in April 2020. 

On April 27, 2020, DeWine announced that Ohio would join a wave of more than a dozen states and impose a statewide mask mandate at open businesses to slow the spread of COVID-19. 

But it never took effect, at least in the short run. The very next day, DeWine reversed himself, saying too many Ohioans found the notion of being forced to wear a mask “offensive.”

It wasn’t until July 2020, weeks after Acton resigned, that Ohio first required masks indoors, becoming roughly the 30th U.S. state to do so. 

What about closing churches?

A perennial myth of pandemic lore is that Ohio ordered the closure of churches during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Ohio Republican Party on Tuesday posted on social media an image of a man holding a sign – created by conservative organization Turning Point USA – that says “Don’t Let Dems Shut Down Our Churches.” He’s standing next to a cardboard cutout of Acton, wearing a blue cloth mask. 

Rep. Adam Mathews, a Cincinnati Republican and attorney who serves in the General Assembly, in late July penned an op-ed with the headline “Amy Acton closed churches, kept abortions going. I am Catholic. That’s what matters.” (The headline was later corrected.)

However, Ohio never shut down churches during the pandemic. And Ohio’s Republican attorney general used the health department’s shutdown of “nonessential” medical procedures to include abortion clinics, an interpretation later overturned by federal courts. In other words, Acton’s health order was used as the legal basis to shutter abortion clinics until judges intervened. Mathews didn’t return a phone call.

DeWine, a religious conservative, asked that churches either refrain from convening in person or at least adopt social distancing measures, but he said it wouldn’t be enforced so as not to interfere with people’s constitutional rights to free exercise of religion. Acton’s health order was explicit on this point. 

“This Order does not apply to and/or excludes religious gatherings, gatherings for the purpose of the expression of First Amendment protected speech,” it states.

Dan Tierney, a DeWine spokesman, said in an interview Tuesday he recalled the administration taking a lot of heat on the issue, but, he said, it’s simply incorrect to suggest any official action closed a church in Ohio. 

He said some people perhaps mistook churches’ voluntary decision to close as the result of a health order. But on the other hand, the era was a hotbed of bad actors speaking untruths. 

“During covid, there was a lot of misinformation on a lot of things from all ends of the political spectrum,” he said. “This is not the first time we had to answer that [church closure] question. We had to answer it back then too.”

California, for its part, took a more aggressive stance and closed churches. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the order, deeming it a violation of the First Amendment.  

A misleading nursing home ad

COVID-19 spread most efficiently in communal settings and hit older and infirmed populations the hardest. This combination left nursing homes uniquely vulnerable. 

Every state struggled with the same problems – not enough testing to detect the virus or personal protective equipment to slow its spread. States tried increasing pay for the care workforce, surging protective equipment into the facilities, and restricting visitors. 

Ohio, along with at least 30 other states, including Texas and Florida, banned nursing home visits in an effort to slow the spread of the virus, although research suggests the policy was ineffective. Other studies have found that no state emerged as a role model in their handling of nursing homes during the pandemic, where 39% of all COVID-19 deaths occurred.

A recent ad from the Ramaswamy campaign invokes Acton’s decisions on the subject. In the ad, a Republican activist named Linda Caudill says her mother was in a nursing home when “Amy Acton shut down the state.” She said her mother was old and couldn’t comprehend why her family couldn’t visit. 

“Amy Acton is to blame for this,” the ad states.

The ad criticizes Acton for the virus mitigation measures, while showing headlines about COVID-19-related deaths in Ohio nursing homes. 

What’s more, some of the claims of Caudill – who is arguably best known for a Columbus Dispatch photograph that captured her angrily screaming outside the Ohio Statehouse in April 2020 while DeWine and Acton gave a press conference – don’t seem to hold up either. A Columbus Dispatch fact check found that Caudill’s mother lived in Kentucky and died after Ohio lifted its stay-at-home order. 

Ohio Democrats called the ad a “scam,” and Democratic Party spokeswoman Katie Seewer accused Ramaswamy of resorting to “baseless and easily disproven lies because he’s desperate to salvage any thread of his failing campaign.”

Signal Statewide reached out to Caudill for comment. 

Andrew Tobias contributed reporting. 

This story originally appeared at signalohio.com.

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The e-cigarettes’ flavors ranged from “strawmelon” to “blueberry raspberry-gami” and virtually none of them were legal when they were sold in tobacco stores around the state. 

But as lawyers for tobacco retailers argued to the Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday, only the federal government gets to enforce the rules on tobacco marketing. The state’s effort to do so, they say, is unconstitutional. 

The lawsuit is one of two major ongoing legal battles from Ohio’s government – or parts of it, at least – against flavored tobacco and nicotine products, which are seen as a lure for teenagers and young adults into an addictive habit. 

Through both cases, the court will set the limits on the power of Ohio and its cities to cut down on what they see as a looming nicotine and tobacco addiction crisis in the making. 

While adult cigarette rates have plunged, nearly 1 in 5 Ohio high schoolers say they’ve used an e-cigarette within the past 30 days. Tobacco use remains a leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. 

The question before the Ohio Supreme Court Tuesday was whether state officials can use state consumer protection laws to target sales of flavored vapes and e-cigarettes, all of which are illegal under federal tobacco laws. At the time of the lawsuit, the FDA had never approved a flavored tobacco product besides menthol. (In a first in May 2026, the FDA approved four flavored vape devices made by Glas.)

Despite the federal ban on non-FDA-approved tobacco products, enforcement is notoriously lax, said Marisa Katz, an attorney with the Public Health Law Center, which has backed the Ohio attorney general’s office. That puts the workload on the state. 

“They can’t monitor every product sale across the country,” she said of the FDA.

“And that’s why this case is so important because states are best positioned to respond to local problems more quickly than federal agencies are.”

Then-Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost in 2024 filed civil lawsuits against Orrville Tobacco in Wayne County, Central Tobacco in Delaware County, and Elev8 Smoke Shop in Cincinnati for selling illegal vapes. Elev8 sits half a mile from a local high school.

Appellate courts have split on the issue of whether federal tobacco laws preclude state officials from intervening as an enforcer.

Mixed signals

The justices offered mixed signals Tuesday on how they might rule, speaking only in the context of questions to both sides’ attorneys. Justice Jennifer Brunner, the court’s lone Democrat, said that “consumers are being duped” when stores stock illegal products on the shelves and imply that they’re legal. 

Justice Pat DeWine, a Republican, at one point suggested that the attorney general’s office was distancing itself from some elements of its original lawsuit. But at others, he seemed to agree with Brunner. 

“Isn’t it reasonable to think that someone who walks into a store and picks it up off a shelf thinks it’s a legal product?” he said to a lawyer representing the tobacco sellers. 

Two facts drive the case, said Sam Peterson, a lawyer for now-Ohio Attorney General Andrew Wilson. The flavored e-cigarettes being sold are illegal, and the state has the legal right to prohibit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes. 

James Fraser, an attorney for Central Tobacco who specializes in tobacco and e-cigarette cases, said to justices that the state is conflating marketing approvals and product safety. 

“They say, if you put a sign next to the product in the store that says, ‘these products are illegal,’ then the state seems to be saying there is no problem,” he said.

Ohio cities ban flavored tobacco

Despite the prohibition, sales of thousands of models of flavored, disposable vapes have exploded in the U.S., according to both Katz and the findings of a U.S. Government Accountability Office study. 

Gov. Mike DeWine (father of Pat DeWine, the justice) has fought for stricter tobacco laws for much of his four decades in state and federal politics. As governor, he has tried and failed over two terms to convince lawmakers to ban flavored tobacco sales. 

Facing refusal from Republican state lawmakers, Democratic-controlled cities large and small in Ohio (especially in the Columbus area) have stepped in. Their bans vary, sometimes including flavors of Zyns, an increasingly popular oral nicotine pouch. The cities also enacted their own enforcement schemes to uphold these laws, plus Ohio’s 21-and-up tobacco law. 

Republican state lawmakers responded with a “preemption” law, which is essentially the state’s way of claiming a policy arena for itself and forbidding cities from passing stiffer regulations of their own. They managed to secure the supermajority required to override a veto from Gov. DeWine. 

Cities have challenged the law, citing a home rule provision in the state constitution that grants them political autonomy. Oral arguments were held in June.

The Ohio Supreme Court is now poised to rule on both cases.

This story originally appeared at signalohio.com.

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Electric bills will likely hit record highs for millions of Ohioans when July bills go out this month, driven by rising rates, new systemic demand and a heat dome that lingered over much of the Midwest. 

New data from the Ohio Utility Rate Survey – a state publication based on cost data from utilities – shows the electric bill for a residential electric customer using an average amount of power hit record levels in Cleveland ($189), Dayton ($188) and Akron ($184) in July. 

It’s not much better elsewhere. Columbus’ July ($198.53) is $1 from the high watermark in May 2024. Toledo ($175) was about $6 off from its June 2023 record. Cincinnati’s July bill ($171) is just $1 short of the local record set last June.

On a statewide basis, that means July bills are 12% higher than last year and a whopping 62% higher than they were a decade ago. 

“Is this a new normal? Probably, at least for the near future,” said Tom Bullock, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit that advocates for lower electric rates for residential customers.  

These figures assume what the federal government considers to be an average household’s use of 900 kilowatt-hours. Real consumption will vary based on different factors like efficiency and household size, but a stretch of intense heat early in the month spurred heavy demand on electricity-intensive air conditioners. 

Experts said a complex mix of factors are pushing prices upward. Hot weather means more demand all at the same time. A development boom for data centers, the energy-intensive megafacilities serving the artificial intelligence sector, adds to that demand systemically. Coal-fired power plants have gone offline. Grid operators have been slow to allow new power producers into the system. And some have accused utilities of either inflating or at least relying on speculative assumptions of data center building to boost their own bottom lines. 

Whatever the cause, the effect is palpable on the monthly bills. For a Columbus household, in American Electric Power Ohio’s service territory, 900 kilowatt-hours in July 2016 cost $118. Today, that’s about $199. That’s a difference of $81 more for the month. The 10-year spike is similarly seen across the state. 

Three components drive electric bills: generation costs (the power you use), transmission costs (sending huge amounts of power across long distances from the power plant), and distribution costs (the last poles and wires before the end user). The data show that while transmission and distribution costs, both of which are set by regulators, have increased modestly, generation charges are behind most of the cost increase. 

There are some limits to the data. It only goes back to 2015. And it doesn’t reflect rates paid by those who have chosen their own electricity supplier, or those on a municipal aggregation program. 

Why are Ohio electric costs increasing?

Signal Statewide asked a variety of industry players the same basic question: why have electric bills gotten so out of control?

None offered simple answers. All blamed a mix of culprits.

Several singled out PJM, which operates the regional electric grid, spanning 13 states including Ohio. PJM hosts capacity auctions, where a price is set for a reserve of power to ensure reliability when demand hits its highest. Those auctions have seen massive price spikes year over year since 2024. 

Among the biggest causes is the failure of PJM and state regulators to quickly let new electrons into the system, said Nolan Rutschilling, the managing director of energy policy at the Ohio Environmental Council.  

Besides a queue backlog, he said natural gas has gotten preferential regulatory treatment in terms of navigating the permitting bureaucracy. But gas turbines are in short supply these days, meaning new plants can take five to seven years to get to the market. Renewable energy sources can be built much faster, but are subjected to far more regulatory scrutiny in Ohio. 

This supply crunch, coupled with the new demand from more than 200 operational or planned data centers and huge industrial projects like Intel’s $28 billion chip fabrication plant or Anduril’s $1 billion advanced weapons factory in central Ohio, means higher costs. 

“We’ve got really high prices because we aren’t bringing enough energy online,” Rutschilling said. 

Bullock, from Citizens Utility Board, said President Donald Trump’s administration’s tariffs have worsened the effect, hiking the costs of steel that make up much of the physical power grid. And that grid, he said, has lacked proper maintenance, causing inefficient performance and likely warranting an expensive upgrade sometime in the future. 

He lives in Lakewood, Ohio, and has personally seen the effects of an under-maintained electric grid and the unusually high rate and duration of the blackouts that come from it. 

There’s also a U.S. war against Iran driving up the cost of raw fuels, an effect that tends to spill into electricity markets. And PJM, Bullock said, has been slow-footed allowing new generators – especially renewables – onto the grid. 

That pressure is all mounting cumulatively, and there’s no obvious dynamic that would change things in the near term. 

“You could easily see prices not letting up for the next five years,” he said. 

There’s reason for more scrutiny, if not skepticism, around some of the finger pointing at data centers, said John Seryak, an engineer who works as a technical consultant to the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association. In an interview, he said utilities are making speculative and rosy assumptions about how likely a planned data center is to come to fruition. But they’re treating those assumptions as fact when making grid investment decisions. 

And on the supply side, he said some technocratic changes have left PJM overestimating the impact of several coal-fired power plants during the 2010s. This would mean PJM is overestimating the drop in supply, which produces a price increase. 

Ohio can make policy changes to mitigate the damage in the medium- to long term. But until then, he said people should expect higher bills, seek energy efficiencies where possible, and budget accordingly. 

“I think right now, between transmission and capacity, I wouldn’t count on prices to come down between now and 2030,” he said.

Transmission costs are rising too, another trend driven by data centers, said Jon Blackwood, a spokesperson for the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel. And part of the problem is the murkiness around what costs can be shifted to customers.

“Forecasting issues include lack of transparency, potential double counting, and accuracy,” he said.

What do the utilities say?

Signal Statewide reached out to Ohio’s major, investor-owned electric utility companies that own utilities in Ohio: American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, AES, and Duke Energy. 

By AEP’s own calculations, its distribution rates have increased 36%, the company said in a statement. Those increases are primarily tied to the increased cost for equipment, gas and labor flowing into the grid.

The company emphasized that the price hikes stem from the generation side of the ledger, and Ohio laws don’t allow distribution utilities like AEP Ohio to own power plants. And the company noted its recent regulatory effort to force data centers to absorb more risk in grid investments.

“Generation costs are the primary reason electric bills have increased in Ohio, and in Ohio, utilities like AEP Ohio are not permitted to own generation,” the company said.

“The average AEP Ohio customer’s generation bill has increased 103% in the last five years. That is material for Ohioans, and we are very concerned by it … In the PJM territory, there is an imbalance between the supply of electrons on the grid and demand for them. And since we cannot own generation, we are with our customers, waiting for the market to respond.”

FirstEnergy responded as well, noting – as have its competitors in the past – that utilities don’t set unit prices for electricity. However, utilities do set, pending regulatory approval, the transmission and distribution costs, which have increased over the decade. 

Will Boye, a FirstEnergy spokesperson, said the company understands that even small cost increases can have big impacts in an inflationary economy.

“We must continue investing in our system in order to provide the safe, reliable service our customers count on,” he said. “We know that costs matter, which is why these investments are carefully planned and focused on delivering real, lasting value for the communities we serve.”

This story originally appeared at signalohio.com.

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