Jeff Guo

The infrastructure expanded little by little over time, and everybody paid for it collectively.

But as more and more companies were asking to connect more and more data centers and get access to more and more power, Mark realized all this could kind of break the system and really raise prices for residential customers.

Or the data center company could show up, connect to power, but just take forever to start using and paying for all the electricity they asked for.

Or they could change their mind and close up shop after a year or two.

If any of that happened, it would be the rest of AEP Ohio's customers who would end up getting stuck footing the bill.

Like you say that I'm the president of AEP Ohio and somebody's... Yeah, I sometimes just want to be Mark.

If AEP Ohio raised rates for residential customers to connect all these data centers, it would, to say the least, be pretty politically unpopular.

And remember, if Mark wants to raise rates, he has to get permission from the Public Utility Commission, which is appointed by the governor...

Who has to answer to voters?

So Mark had to find a way to thread this needle.

What they came up with was a pretty innovative set of new rules.

Rules just for data centers.

AEP Ohio would require data centers to start paying for the vast majority of the energy they requested within four years.

And the data centers had to put up millions of dollars in case they didn't end up sticking around.

The new rules got approved by the State Utility Commission and went into place earlier this year.

It's one of the first data center-specific utility rates in the country.

And using the data from Ken's spreadsheet of all his electric bills and

talking to energy experts, we estimate that only about 10 or 20 percent of the price increases Ken and Carol saw were because of AEP Ohio.

AP Ohio, though, they are just the local distributor.

Their job is only to bring electricity the last mile to people's homes.