Keith Romer

His job is to make sure that the multicolored grid that AEP owns stays up and running and to figure out what new red and green and black power lines need to be built to get all the electricity where it needs to go.

It costs billions of dollars to expand that highway system, to build out those long distance transmission networks.

Those costs get passed on to customers, just like costs get passed on for distribution at the local level.

When AEP spends money to upgrade its infrastructure, it's generally allowed to recoup that money from the people it serves.

The regulator that has to approve any price increases, in this case, is the federal government.

It is really hard to tease out precisely how much of the increase in Ken and Carol's electricity charges comes from building out the transmission grid.

let alone isolate what part of that build-out was specifically due to data centers.

But from what we can tell from talking to experts and comparing their old bills to their new ones, transmission, it actually isn't that big of a culprit either.

Transmission charges did go up over the last five years, but that change seems to account for less than 20% of their total increase.

Which leaves more than half of the increase unaccounted for.

The culprit here is generation.

It's the power plants that make the electricity in the first place.

But that story is way, way weirder than just power plants jacked up their prices.

And in a lot of the western and southern parts of the U.S., you still do have these vertically integrated omnibus power companies.

But for now, we are going to stay with Ohio.

And in Ohio, about 25 years ago, they threw out that old system and they broke up these vertically integrated companies.

And it worked for a while.

But today, with all the new demand for power from data centers, that system is starting to break down.

To help explain this bit, we called up Kathy Kunkel.

Kathy is an energy consultant at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.