Republicans Raised Your Ohio Electric Bill — From Washington to the County Courthouse

On June 1, for the second summer in a row, the price of electricity jumped across Ohio. AEP Ohio's default supply rate hit 10.12 cents per kilowatt-hour — up 38 percent from where it stood in May 2025. FirstEnergy's three Ohio utilities tacked on another $10 to $12 a month for a typical household, one year after raising the same bills $14 to $16 a month. AES Ohio customers absorbed a second straight double-digit supply increase. By April, federal data showed Ohio's average residential electricity price had climbed 19.4 percent in a single year — the second-largest increase in the nation — blowing past the national average for the first time in years.

None of this happened by accident. It happened by vote.

Some of those votes were cast in Washington, where every Republican in Ohio's congressional delegation voted to gut the tax credits that finance new power plants. Some were cast in Columbus, where a Republican legislature handed county commissioners a veto over solar and wind farms — and only solar and wind farms. And some were cast in county courthouses from Knox County to Clark County, where commissioners used that veto exactly as designed. Three levels of government, one party, one result: at the precise moment Ohio needed every megawatt it could build, the supply didn't show up. Your electric bill is the receipt.

The Bill Comes Due

Start with the mechanics, because they matter to the argument. The supply portion of an Ohio electric bill is set by markets run by PJM, the regional grid operator for 13 states. Every year PJM runs a "capacity auction" that pays power plants to promise they'll be available three years out. When supply is plentiful, the auction clears cheap. In 2024, it stopped clearing cheap.

The auction for 2025–26 cleared at $269.92 per megawatt-day, up from $28.92 the year before — a ninefold jump. That is what landed on Ohio bills in June 2025, when the PUCO itself warned customers the increases were coming. The next auction cleared at $329.17, the maximum price regulators allowed — it would have hit $388.57 without the cap — and that is what landed on bills this June. In December, the auction for 2027–28 set another record: $333.44, with PJM falling 6,623 megawatts short of its own reliability target. Ohio consumers will pay a share of a record $16.1 billion in capacity costs for the year that just began, and the year after that is already locked in higher.

Even Ohio's utility regulator, not an institution given to drama, wrote plainly that "in summer 2025, we see another spike in generation rates, largely due to supply and demand impacts driving PJM capacity prices higher."

Supply and demand. Demand exploded. And supply — the part Ohio actually controls — was strangled by policy, deliberately, over a decade.

Demand Exploded. New Supply Was Made Illegal.

The demand side of this story is data centers, and the numbers are staggering. Data center load in AEP Ohio's central Ohio territory grew from about 100 megawatts in 2020 to 600 megawatts in 2024, with 5,000 megawatts contracted by 2030. PJM's independent market monitor found data centers responsible for 63 percent of the 2025–26 capacity price spike and 45 percent — $21.3 billion — of the last three auctions' total costs. In the most recent auction, 97 percent of PJM's projected load growth was data centers.

A demand shock is not a party's fault. What happens next is. Prices in a capacity market are a function of whether supply can answer demand — and whether supply can answer demand in Ohio is a policy choice that Republican officials have been making, in one direction, since before anyone had heard of ChatGPT.

A Decade of Choosing Less Power

The tally is not small. A May analysis by Save Ohio Parks counted more than 5,300 megawatts of wind and solar that Ohio lawmakers and regulators have blocked over roughly twelve years — more than five large nuclear reactors' worth of the cheapest electricity available. "That's a lot of inexpensive power that we don't have available to us," the director of the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio told Canary Media, as prices soared.

It started in 2014, when the Republican legislature rewrote wind-turbine setback rules in a budget amendment, effectively killing over 3,300 megawatts of planned wind. Then came the main event: Senate Bill 52, signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in July 2021. Sponsored by Republican Sens. Bill Reineke and Rob McColley, it passed the Senate 21–12 and the House 52–43 with only Republican support. SB52 gives county commissioners the power to ban utility-scale solar and wind from whole townships, and to veto individual projects before the developer can even file an application. It created no such county authority over coal mines, gas plants, or oil wells. The kill switch was built for renewables alone.

Counties used it. By the end of 2025, 31 of Ohio's 88 counties had restricted or banned utility-scale solar under SB52 authority. In Knox County, two Republicans won commissioner primaries in 2024 campaigning explicitly against "industrial solar" — and delivered: in February 2025, commissioners Barry Lester, Drenda Keesee, and Bill Pursel voted unanimously to ban utility-scale solar in 20 of the county's 22 townships and wind projects countywide.

Where counties didn't ban projects outright, their opposition became the kill mechanism at the state level. The Ohio Power Siting Board — which had approved 34 consecutive solar projects before 2022 — has now rejected eight since SB52 changed the politics, citing local government opposition as the reason each time. The 300-megawatt Birch Solar. The 175-megawatt Kingwood Solar, still awaiting an Ohio Supreme Court ruling more than a year after argument. In March, the board killed the 94-megawatt Crossroads Solar in Morrow County after two Republican lawmakers — including Sen. Reineke, SB52's own co-sponsor — personally urged the denial; the developer alleged some of the opposing public comments came from people who could not be found in voter rolls or directories, allegations the board largely declined to address.

And last week, the board rejected the 180-megawatt Sloopy Solar project in Clark County — the eighth utility-scale solar farm killed by Ohio officials since 2020 — because of "unanimous opposition from each local government entity," including a county commission that had passed an opposition resolution in January. The project would have paid roughly $1.62 million a year in local taxes and employed about 200 union construction workers. The same week, RWE quietly withdrew its 116-megawatt Hillclimber Solar in Champaign County, joining roughly 1,000 megawatts of Ohio projects whose developers — like Grange Solar's, who walked away from 500 megawatts in Logan County — read the room and stopped trying. As this site has documented week after week, Ohio is the epicenter of American solar obstruction.

Meanwhile, wind and solar supplied just 7.5 percent of Ohio's electricity in 2025. The megawatts Ohio blocked were not hypothetical. They were the supply response the capacity market was screaming for.

Washington Finished the Job

Whatever chance Ohio had of building its way out got materially harder on July 4, 2025, when President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. OBBBA terminates the clean electricity tax credits for wind and solar: projects that don't start construction by this Saturday — July 4 — must be in service by the end of 2027 to qualify for anything, a timeline that excludes most utility-scale projects. As we covered when a federal court struck down the administration's attempt to squeeze the deadline even tighter, the industry has been racing that cliff all year.

Every Republican in Ohio's House delegation — all ten — voted yes on July 3, 2025, in a bill that passed 218–214. Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno voted yes. And the 50–50 Senate tie was broken by Vice President JD Vance — Ohio's own. No state's fingerprints are more thoroughly on this law.

The projected consequences for the state that provided the tie-breaking vote: Energy Innovation models Ohio electricity rates rising 7 to 11 percent because of the law, household energy costs up $94 a year by 2030 and $190 by 2035, and roughly 14,000 megawatts of new Ohio generating capacity that now won't be built. Independent modeling by NERA for the Clean Energy Buyers Association reached the same direction: roughly 7 percent higher residential electricity prices. The market reacted faster than the models: nationally, about $14.3 billion in clean energy projects — roughly 8,000 megawatts — were cancelled in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

Higher demand, less supply, and a federal thumb on the scale against the fastest-to-build generation. That is the policy stack under your June bill.

The Honest Accounting

Now the part an honest reader deserves. Republicans did not cause the demand shock. Data centers did — the market monitor calls their growth "the primary reason" capacity prices are high, and no county commissioner conjured 30,000 megawatts of hyperscaler interconnection requests at AEP Ohio's door. Regulators actually deserve some credit here: the PUCO's first-in-the-nation data center tariff, approved last July, forces large data centers to pay for 85 percent of the capacity they claim, whether or not they use it.

It's also true that the OBBBA cost projections are forward-looking models from clean-energy-aligned groups, not observed bills; the increases Ohioans have paid so far are overwhelmingly capacity-market driven, and OBBBA's bite arrives mostly in 2027 and beyond. PJM's clogged interconnection queue — a bureaucratic failure that predates this Congress — has kept new supply of every kind waiting in line. Gas prices, plant retirements, and transmission constraints all played their part.

But every one of those caveats runs into the same wall: when demand surges, the only remedy anyone has ever invented is supply. Between the 2014 setback law, SB52's one-party passage, 31 counties' worth of bans, eight state rejections, and a federal tax law that Ohio's delegation voted for to kill the pipeline that remained — the supply response was made slower, smaller, and more expensive at every level of government where Republicans held the pen. The data centers wrote the demand curve. Republicans wrote the supply curve.

The Read From Here

The next two summers are already priced: the 2026–27 and 2027–28 auctions cleared at their caps or records, so Ohio bills rise again in June 2027 regardless of what anyone does now. The variables that remain are political. The Ohio Supreme Court's pending Kingwood decision could restore some sanity to how "public interest" gets defined at the siting board. County commissions can un-designate restricted areas as easily as they designated them — Knox County's commissioners will eventually have to explain to their constituents why their townships are closed to the one industry offering seven-figure annual tax payments while their electric bills lead the nation in growth. And the July 4 construction-start deadline arrives this week; every Ohio project that beats it is a megawatt the capacity market desperately needs.

Electricity prices are set by supply and demand. Demand was never on the ballot. Supply was — in the 2021 statehouse votes, in the 2024 county commissioner primaries, in the 2025 reconciliation bill. Ohioans voting on their next county commission, their next legislature, and their next Congress should know exactly which boxes on the ballot their electric bill is paying for.