The central Ohio city of New Albany has become a focal point of the state's data center boom, with over 100 facilities in the region powering everything from tech support to data storage for Meta, Google and Amazon, to name a few. Demand seems unlikely to slow. And as data centers continue to spring up, so to does the infrastructure to support them — like high-voltage transmission lines.
"It's not like the lines you see behind your house or the lines you might see in your neighborhood," said Ohio-based investigative journalist Mya Frazier. "I mean, the trunk of these things are as big as a sequoia. They're just massive."
Frazier wrote about two particular high-voltage lines for a story published by both Switchyard magazine and the Food & Environment Reporting Network. In it, she looked at how the 13-mile corridor for the lines cuts across farmland and affects communities, as well as the secretive process through which the state incentivized the data center boom.
"Marketplace" host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Frazier about her story. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: Would you tell me what these data centers in central Ohio look like?
Mya Frazier: In the plainest terms, they're just buildings, but they're kind of monstrosities in a lot of ways. Where I live in central Ohio, there has been just a massive boom in data center development in a town called New Albany, which is north of Columbus.
Ryssdal: For those unfamiliar, what's inside these places? Because that's the nub of this story.
Frazier: Data centers require an immense amount of electricity to run, and so much of what sort of comprises these buildings is wires and network connections and electrical equipment.
Ryssdal: And that gets us to why we're talking to you and what really is going on in central Ohio, which is the electricity demands of these places. Virtually everything inside it requires electricity, and the power companies are stringing them across the central Ohio landscape, as you say.
Frazier: Yes, and more is coming. There's a bit of a battle over some new transmission lines — about 13 miles long, two different lines that are going to be running from a city [that] used to be a small farm town north of New Albany all the way to just on the outskirts of, sort of the residential areas of New Albany. It's not like the lines you see behind your house or the lines you might see in your neighborhood. I mean, the trunk of these things are as big as a sequoia. They're just massive.
Ryssdal: I think this is the beginning of the piece. You stood there for a while and you listened, right?
Frazier: I did. I had sort of heard rumors that these things crackle. And I had been doing some reporting among some farmers that are sort of right in the bull's-eye of where these things are going to run through and talked to a lot of residents who live around these [about] just what is it like? And it's quite eerie. I mean, I stood under them, and you just feel this crackle and this slight hum. It's a very unnerving feeling to be underneath these.
Ryssdal: Tell me about the farmers and the towns that live under these wires that you spent some time with.
Frazier: The area between has always been a very rural area. A lot of the farmers have been sort of feeling powerless to this development that's happened, and not only has it had an influence on the cost of farmland, but it's also influenced people who moved to this area because they were trying to escape the sort of sprawling development that's happening, both with Columbus and around New Albany, where a lot of the big tech development has unfolded,
Ryssdal: It seems likely, given the way society is going, that demand for these data centers, and thus demand for electricity, is only going to grow. What then happens to the communities underneath the power lines and around the data centers as that growth happens?
Frazier: Well, we've seen a massive increase in the price of farmland, which has made farming unsustainable for families who have farmed for generations around this area. We've also seen very little public benefit to the development of these data centers in the area. The deals that have been made have all been negotiated by Jobs Ohio, which is the privatized arm of economic development in Ohio, and I think that's left a lot of local people feeling like they are powerless before this massive expansion of big tech infrastructure in Middle America.
