COLUMBUS, Ohio — Environmental groups are sounding the alarm about Ohio’s data center invasion, warning that unchecked growth is fueling a dramatic increase in fracking on state parks and public lands.
Save Ohio Parks, which has tracked the health and environmental impacts of oil and gas fracking, released a white paper this week titled “From Demand Drivers to Development Partners: Data Centers that Work for Ohioans.” The report argues that Ohio’s failure to build out renewable energy has left the state dependent on fracked natural gas to power a data center boom that is now threatening public lands, drinking water, and the health of communities.
The report was authored by Rachel Kutzley, a Save Ohio Parks board member who spent a decade in U.S. foreign policy before earning a master’s degree in Environment and Natural Resources from Ohio State University.
A crisis decades in the making
Ohio is home to more than 200 data centers — fifth-most in the country — with more than 130 clustered in the Columbus region alone, serving Amazon, Meta, Google, and other major tech companies. Nearly 100 more sites are planned or proposed by 2030.
The report argues that the state created its own energy crisis. Over the past decade, a series of laws restricting wind and solar development in Ohio has cost, according to the report, more than 5.3 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity. A 2014 provision buried in the state budget bill tripled wind turbine setback requirements, bringing more than 3,300 MW of proposed wind projects to a halt. Senate Bill 52, passed in 2021, allowed county commissioners to ban wind and solar projects — and 37 counties have since done so. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio separately canceled more than 2,000 MW of solar projects.
American Electric Power now reports 5.6 GW of data center interconnection requests as of March 2026 — almost exactly matching the renewable capacity Ohio blocked, the group argues.
“The data center energy crunch would not exist today had Ohio built out its renewable energy potential,” Kutzley said.
State parks targeted
The energy shortfall is pushing new development directly onto Ohio’s public lands. In just the first quarter of 2026, more than 17,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park and Egypt Valley Wildlife Area were nominated for oil and gas extraction.
Children living near fracking sites are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia, according to a Yale University study cited in the report. The Ohio oil and gas industry has experienced an accident or incident on average every 1.5 days, according to public records reviewed by FracTracker Alliance.
Neighborhoods in the crossfire
The report documents how data centers — unable to wait for grid interconnection — are increasingly building gas-fired power plants directly on site, placing industrial-scale energy generation in residential neighborhoods with no public input.
House Bill 15, signed into law in 2025, allows data centers to fast-track approval for these behind-the-meter gas facilities in as little as 45 days, with no public notice, no public hearing, and no consultation with local officials.
Shortly after the law took effect, the state approved what the report describes as the largest fracked-gas fuel cell in North America to power an Amazon data center in Hilliard, a Columbus suburb. The facility sits adjacent to a park, an elementary school, and hundreds of homes, and is projected to emit up to 1.45 million pounds of carbon dioxide per day. The Hilliard project also includes plans for 158 diesel backup generators, which the report warns could simultaneously come online during a grid outage, creating a significant local air pollution event.
A planned Meta data center in New Albany, just outside Columbus, would install 400 MW of on-site gas combustion generation — enough capacity to power approximately 830,000 homes — and would operate for 25 to 30 years, requiring a continuous supply of fracked gas for decades.
Rising costs, falling on those least able to pay
The report also raises concerns about the financial burden data centers are placing on Ohio ratepayers. Ohio electric bills increased an average of 30 percent from 2015 to 2025. In Columbus, a typical monthly home electric bill jumped $27 in 2025, with analysts projecting an additional 10 to 15 percent increase through 2026.
An independent market monitor for the PJM regional grid found that data centers were responsible for 63 percent of the increase in regional capacity prices, adding an average of $16 per month to Ohio residential bills. The monitor concluded that ratepayers are effectively subsidizing the infrastructure being built to serve data centers.
The burden falls hardest on low-income households, the report notes, which on average spend nearly 20 percent of their income on energy — three times the share paid by higher-income households.
The Guardian previously reported on the massive development proposed in Piketon, where officials have promoted plans for what they describe as the world’s largest data center and the world’s largest natural‑gas power plant. The project is slated for a rural southern Ohio community with some of the highest cancer rates in the nation — a place where residents once enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
What Save Ohio Parks is demanding
The group is calling for a state moratorium on all new data center approvals until comprehensive regulations are in place, and is urging the state to ban the use of nondisclosure agreements in data center siting decisions. Similar agreements sparked controversy over the decision to grant tax incentives for the massive data center planned for Franklin Furnace in Scioto County.
Among its core demands: require data centers to meet 100 percent of their energy needs through solar, wind, and battery storage; make tax incentives contingent on energy and water efficiency and public reporting; require data centers to pay their share of grid modernization costs; and mandate water efficiency measures with regular public disclosure.
The report also calls on state lawmakers to repeal or reform Senate Bill 52, which allows counties to ban solar and wind but grants no equivalent authority over gas projects — a disparity the group calls a fundamental inequity in Ohio energy law.
Lea Harper, director of the Freshwater Accountability Project, endorsed the report’s findings. “It’s well documented that toxic, radioactive wastewater remaining after extractive oil and natural gas fracking will never sparkle in the sun again. It can never be consumed by humans or livestock again.”
Growing resistance
Public opposition to unregulated data center growth has already produced results at the local level. Washington Township, Jerome Township, Waterville, South Bloomfield, and Ashville have all passed or considered moratoriums on new data center development.
In March, a group of rural Ohioans submitted language for a statewide constitutional ballot initiative that would ban data centers larger than 25 MW. The Ohio Ballot Board approved the group to begin collecting signatures; they need more than 413,000 valid signatures from half of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1 to place the measure on the November ballot.
The report warns that without statewide action, communities with fewer resources to organize opposition risk becoming what it calls “sacrifice zones” — bearing the environmental and health costs of an industry that brings benefits largely elsewhere. If Ohio’s history shows anything, it’s that sacrifice zones are real. Just ask the Pike County families who have buried children lost to rare cancers.
The full report can be viewed below: