Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment
The power needs of Ohio’s #data #centers are already staggering,
but the near future is hard to even imagine.
By 2030, in Central Ohio alone, demand will skyrocket to more than 5,000 megawatts
—roughly equivalent to the power consumption of all of New York City.
That power must be delivered to those facilities somehow
-- And so along with the data centers, miles and miles of new high-voltage #transmission #lines are needed in the state.
American Electric Power has chosen distressed farms and politically weak rural communities as sites to clear paths for more transmission lines,
and for good reason:
⚠️these communities have the least influence to resist such encroachment.
longreads.com/2025/01/16/power…
Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment
I wanted to make sense of another kind of imbalance within the landscape of central Ohio: that between corporate control and ordinary people; between economic development and nature; and, most acutely in a season of drought, between electricity-hungr…Brendan Fitzgerald (Longreads)