Keith Romer

We are spending more to build data centers than we spent to build the entire interstate highway system.

So investment in data centers has been this giant economic story.

We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars expected to add up to trillions over the next five years.

But, you know, Keith, sometimes this whole thing has felt super abstract, right?

Like it's just a line on a graph called data centers and it's going up and up and up.

Just the smell of raw infrastructure.

Right.

But there's a lot you can't figure out just by looking at the data centers and their power lines.

To really understand why Ken and Carol's electricity prices went up as much as they did, you need to understand the market for electricity, which is just really weird.

It has all these different complicated layers to it.

So we are going to try to peel back those layers and figure out who is to blame for Ken and Carol's electricity prices going up so much.

Yeah.

Sure.

Mark Ryder, president of AEP Ohio.

Mark's company, AEP Ohio, serves about a million and a half customers around the state.

But they are only responsible for delivering electricity to their customers, kind of the last mile of power markets.

A lot of their job is taking care of all the power lines and sometimes building new power lines and substations and whatever else to connect new homes and businesses.

So just one of those bigger data center clusters he's talking about would use the same amount of electricity as the entire city of Fort Worth, Texas.

The primary reason they're allowed to raise rates is because they've invested in their infrastructure, upgrading their power lines or building new lines and substations when they need to.

There were a few ways this could happen.