Setting the Record Straight
August 3, 2026 — Protect Grove City
A recent article argued that the new grid-independent power project in New Albany undercuts data center opposition. The reasoning was something like this: critics said data centers raise everyone’s electric bill, here is one that doesn’t, so watch the critics come up with something new.
The answer is already on the public record, including in the Grove City council chamber, months before the New Albany project was announced.
The article named Veolia as the company building the power grid. Veolia isn’t building it. On July 30, 2026, Veolia was selected to operate and maintain the facility under a performance-based contract. The developer that owns the project was not named in the announcement.
What’s being built is a 350-megawatt microgrid: gas-fired generation paired with a 430 megawatt-hour battery system and medium-voltage distribution, serving one AI data center campus with no connection to the public grid. It’s projected to support 35 to 40 permanent jobs.
The reason for going grid-independent isn’t neighborliness. It’s speed. New generation projects wait roughly five years in interconnection queues. Building your own is faster than standing in line.
New Albany isn’t hosting a power plant. It’s hosting seven of them.
| Project | Size | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Socrates North | 200 MW | Under construction |
| Socrates South | 200 MW | Under construction |
| Socrates the Younger | 250 MW plus 116 MW storage, 109 acres | Approved June 2026 |
| PowerConneX I | 120 MW | Under construction |
| PowerConneX II | 216 MW | Under construction |
| PowerConneX III | 430 MW | Pre-application, requires 24 miles of new 24-inch gas pipeline |
| Neo Power Generation | 500 MW | Pre-application |
Socrates the Younger was the fifth behind-the-meter gas plant approved by the Ohio Power Siting Board in New Albany. Two more are in pre-application. That comes to roughly 1.9 gigawatts of dedicated fossil generation in one community, none of which existed three years ago.
On-site generation does solve one problem: A facility that generates its own electricity and never touches the public grid isn’t bidding against your household for capacity. That’s real…
Here is what it doesn’t touch.
The smokestack moves onto the property line. Normal grid electricity gets generated somewhere else, usually far away, at facilities sited through a process that took into account where people live. On-site generation burns the fuel here, continuously, at the fence line.
The footprint grows. Socrates the Younger takes up 109 acres for the power plant by itself, on top of the data center campus it serves. A project that brings its own generation covers more ground, not less. Wonder how many people could have been fed with that acreage?
Noise gets worse. Continuous gas-fired generation, transformers, and cooling equipment run around the clock. Reciprocating engines produce a lot of low-frequency content, which is what residents living near these facilities consistently report and what the Community Consent Amendment’s standards are written to measure.
Water demand doesn’t change. The data center’s cooling requirement doesn’t shrink because the electricity came from next door, and thermal generation needs cooling of its own. Ohio EPA has also scrapped a proposed rule that would have governed data center discharge into waterways, so that question is less settled now than it was six months ago.
The fuel still has to get there. The proposed PowerConneX III would require 24 miles of new 24-inch natural gas pipeline. That means new easements, a new route, and new landowners along it. Self-sufficiency at the campus isn’t self-sufficiency across the region.
Nobody has said who tears it down. A 350-megawatt gas plant built for a single tenant becomes a stranded asset the moment that tenant’s business case changes, and that risk sits with the host community.
And we won’t even go into the environmental impacts of the fossil fuels burning…
Under Ohio Revised Code 4906.13(B), electric generating facilities above 50 megawatts fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Ohio Power Siting Board. No local government may require a permit for, or otherwise condition the construction and operation of, a facility that holds an OPSB certificate.
Above 50 megawatts, the decision leaves town.
We know how that works out because it already happened twelve miles from here. In Hilliard, AEP Ohio and Amazon proposed a 73-megawatt fuel cell array: 228 units on roughly six acres, fed by an eight-inch gas main, near an elementary school. Hilliard City Council formally opposed it.
It’s proceeding anyway. AEP withdrew its application before Hilliard officials could rule on it, taking the position that state law overrode local approval, and the Ohio Power Siting Board certified the project in September 2025.
Hilliard’s council didn’t lose a vote. IT NEVER EVEN GOT TO TAKE ONE.
So when a developer announces it will bring its own power, look at what’s actually being offered. The most consequential physical component of the project, the thing that runs continuously, emits, occupies acreage, and requires a fuel supply, moves from a decision your elected officials make in a room you can walk into, to a state docket in Columbus where your city is one commenter among many.
The article’s premise is that the complaint keeps shifting, that answering the electric bill question will just produce a new grievance within a week.
The record says otherwise. On April 20, 2026, Cathy Cowan Becker of Save Ohio Parks stood in the Grove City council chamber and walked council through this exact scenario, using Hilliard as the example. She explained how a developer bringing its own generation moves the decision to the state and leaves the city with no vote. (Grove City agendas and minutes)
That was more than three months before the New Albany microgrid was announced. It was five weeks before Headwaters submitted a preliminary plan, and six weeks before the moratorium passed.
The concern was documented first. New Albany confirms it rather than refuting it. What looks like a moving target from a distance is a set of separate objections that were always separate: cost, air, water, noise, land, and control. Only the first one has been addressed and the others have been made worse!
Ordinance C-22-26 pauses high-density computing facilities for twelve months. Residents worked hard for it and that victory bought us critical time to do the work that needed to be done to protect our community!
It also can’t reach a generating facility over 50 megawatts. Nothing a Grove City ordinance says has any legal effect on an OPSB-certified plant. A developer working the sequence could pursue generation approval at the state level during the pause and show up with power already certified the day the moratorium expires.
The moratorium covers part of the project. It doesn’t cover the part that’s hardest to wait out.
Look at where the Community Consent Amendment sets its power threshold: 20 megawatts.
That sits deliberately below the line at which the state takes jurisdiction. A city can’t regulate the power plant. It can still regulate the data center that the power plant exists to serve, through zoning, through annexation, and through the approvals that remain local.
The Amendment attaches to the one piece of these projects that state preemption leaves in Grove City’s hands.
State preemption isn’t an argument against the Community Consent Amendment. It’s the best argument for it. Once the generation decision has been moved out of reach, the land-use decision is the only leverage left, and the only remaining question is who gets to make it.
Pay attention to the shape of the argument being made here. It isn’t “here is what we did about the concerns you raised.” It’s “one of your concerns has been answered and you’re still mad, which proves you were never serious about any of them.”
It shows they either weren’t listening the first time or they are just gaslighting us into letting them continue to rule our city.
Residents didn’t show up with one complaint. They showed up with a list, repeatedly, in public, with their names attached and the video rolling. Water. Noise and infrasound. Air quality. Acreage. Road damage. Tax abatements and what happens to the schools. Who gets to decide. Nobody had to guess at what the concerns were. They were stated out loud in a public chamber, written down, and entered into the record.
What came back addressed the one item on that list that could be fixed by spending money. Everything else was left where it was, and then they preemptively try to recast the people as unreasonable.
This is a familiar pattern, and it isn’t an accident. Pick the most tractable objection. Solve it, or announce that someone else has solved it. Declare the matter settled. Then treat every remaining objection as proof that the opposition was never in good faith to begin with, so that the actual questions never have to be answered at all.
The giveaway is what never gets accounted for. The 109 extra acres. The 24 miles of new pipeline. The 50-megawatt line in state law that quietly moves the biggest piece of the project to Columbus. None of those are new complaints invented after the fact. They were on the record before the answer arrived, and the answer didn’t mention them, because engaging with them would have meant admitting the project has costs that capital can’t buy its way out of.
Then the burden gets flipped. Residents are asked to prove they’re sincere. The developer is never asked to prove the project belongs here. People who live somewhere and want a say in what happens to it get described as obstacles, while the party that stands to make money is treated as the reasonable one for showing up with a plan.
There’s a reason the burden lands where it does. When this goes badly, the company leaves. Its shareholders are diversified, its assets are mobile, and there’s another township down the road that hasn’t heard the pitch yet. The people who bought a house on Rensch Road can’t diversify out of it.
That’s the whole argument for the Community Consent Amendment, in one sentence. The decision should belong to the people who have to live with it, because they’re the only ones who can’t walk away from being wrong.
Sources: Veolia announcement, July 30, 2026; Ohio Power Siting Board case 26-0169-EL-BLN; Farm and Dairy reporting on OPSB approvals in New Albany; American Public Power Association; NBC4 and Axios Columbus reporting on the Hilliard fuel cell project; Ohio Revised Code 4906.13(B).
