Despite facing a tight deadline, a group of residents in southern Ohio remain confident they can gather enough signatures to place a data center ban on the November ballot.
The proposed constitutional amendment would block the construction of data centers with a peak load exceeding 25 megawatts per month, but supporters must collect more than 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe it was achievable,” said Austin Baurichter, a resident of Brown County and part of the group that filed the petition.
The Ohio Ballot Board approved the petition about a month ago, allowing supporters to begin gathering signatures.
“I’m completely confident we’ll secure enough signatures,” said Nikki Gerber, an Adams County resident who also helped submit the proposal.
Baurichter said they are still unsure how many signatures they’ve collected so far but expect to have a clearer estimate in the coming weeks.
The group relies entirely on volunteers to gather signatures.
“That was a deliberate decision to keep the process widely accessible because, in our view, it was the only way to collect the signatures within the required timeframe,” Baurichter said.
Ohio is home to around 200 data centers, ranking fifth in the nation. Most are located in central Ohio, with 26 in Cincinnati and 23 in Cleveland, according to the Data Center Map.
“The momentum and urgency to build data centers are driven at a national level, but decisions about them are often made locally, and the effects are felt locally as well,” said Kate Stoll, project director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues.
More than a dozen cities across Ohio have already enacted temporary moratoriums on data centers.
“There are already many communities pushing back against these projects and raising concerns,” Baurichter said.
“In a way, the grassroots network that formed was already there because of how quickly these data centers were expanding.”
According to the Office of Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, a large data center can consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes.
Data centers accounted for 4% of all electricity use in the United States in 2023, a figure expected to rise to 9% by 2030, the counsel reported.
Virginia, which has a high concentration of data centers, has seen electricity prices rise by as much as 267% in recent years, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
The same institute reports that a large data center can use up to five million gallons of water per day.
“A significant portion of the water used to cool data centers is drawn from municipal supplies,” Stoll said.
The Ohio House unanimously passed a bill to establish a new data center study commission, and it now moves to the Ohio Senate.
Lawmakers in at least 11 states — Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin — have introduced legislation aimed at temporarily banning data centers.
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