Power & ratepayers
Whose grid this load lands on, and what it does to the households on the same wires.
- the campus load is a screening bracket — the demand-pressure read is withheld until an instrument grounds it
Every megawatt figure about a data center sits over a denominator, and that denominator is somebody's grid. A real impact study names the grid and cites the source. It then states what the campus load does to the households on the same wires.
Whose grid this is
| Link | Identification | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Serving retail utility | City of Bowling Green - (OH) | [reference] |
| Holding company | City of Bowling Green - (OH) | [reference] |
| Balancing authority | PJM Interconnection | [reference] |
| Wholesale market (RTO/ISO) | PJM Interconnection (RTO/ISO) | [reference] |
| Retail rate regulator | municipal (home rule, OH) | [reference] |
What those systems already carry
| System | Annual load | Campus share |
|---|---|---|
| City of Bowling Green - (OH) | 518 GWh/yr | 362.86% |
| PJM Interconnection | 815,056 GWh/yr | 0.23% |
| State retail sales | 161,934 GWh/yr | 1.16% |
The disclosed campus draws ~239 MW — at a 0.9 load factor, ~1,880 GWh/yr, the
numerator of every share above. The draw is itself an [inference].
The campus against consumer prices
The demand → consumer-price read needs an instrument-grounded campus load — an air permit or a filed disclosure. This site's load is a screening bracket, so the read is withheld rather than computed off an inference — the gap panel below names the instrument that would ground it.
- Grid foundation layer (#94). The state, City of Bowling Green - (OH), and PJM denominators are now all connector-sourced — Ohio retail from EIA (shared with #91), per-utility retail from the EIA-861 file, and PJM annual demand from EIA-930. The campus is a single load equal to a material fraction of its serving utility's entire retail sales. Denominator vintages differ (utility EIA-861 2024 / BA EIA-930 2024 / state EIA 2025 (1-year spread)): the EIA state seriesid route publishes ahead of the EIA-861 bulk file and the EIA-930 annual sum, so the three shares are not struck against one common year.
The cited service chain with its full citations, the cohort-price qualification, and the load report's inference chain are in the grid annex.
This campus does not draw its power from the grid. It is designed to be fed behind the meter by the
Apollo Power Generation Facility — 350 MW net of gas generation plus a 119.5 MW / 239 MWh
battery, twenty-one turbines and six reciprocating engines, capable of 491 MW gross at design
conditions before derate. [verified]
It was certified on 2026-02-03 by automatic approval, with no public hearings, under Ohio’s accelerated Letter of Notification track — case 25-0973-EL-BLN.
The suffix is the story
BLN is a Board Letter of Notification: the accelerated route that produces an automatic
approval and holds no adjudicatory hearing. BGN is the adjudicated generation-certificate track —
a proceeding that did not happen here. The Power Siting Board’s own press release prints the wrong
suffix, and drops a leading zero besides. The docket caption, all twenty-two Staff Report page
footers, and the electronic filing stamp all say BLN. [verified]
A case number is a claim about what kind of proceeding occurred. Getting it wrong does not merely misfile the document — it asserts a hearing that never took place.
Read the conditions, not the headline
Condition 15 bars any physical or electrical
interconnection with the PJM Transmission Systemrec ; Condition 16 requires a PJM new-service
request and supplemental Board approval before any export; Condition 14 caps output at 350 MW
net. [verified]
That is why the modelled grid draw is about zero — and why the plant appears nowhere in EIA-860M,
the federal generator inventory, in any state, on any sheet. Two readings, neither asserted here: a
plant its certificate bars from the transmission system may be outside Form 860’s scope, or this may
be reporting lag. If the first holds, the behind-the-meter pathway makes large generation
statistically invisible to the inventory every fleet-level count runs off. [open]
Meta’s own letter to the township trustees says that “through our partnership with First Energy,
Meta will pay for millions of dollars in new energy infrastructure investments — network upgrades,
utility substations, and transmission lines.” [reference] A behind-the-meter campus paying
for transmission is not a contradiction, but it is the largest open question on the power side,
and this study holds it open rather than resolving it.
The Staff Report is captured. The application, the ODNR review letter, the data-request responses, the public comments and the Board’s own approval entry are not: the docketing system serves a JavaScript bot challenge to automated retrieval, and the Ohio Secretary of State returns HTTP 403. An access failure is a fact about a server, never about a record — recorded with its date and its response code, and nothing inferred from it.
The record behind this chapter
What this chapter stands on: the records it reads, the inputs its modeled figures rest
on, and the reference data behind its baselines — the same pages the record screens
serve, not a second copy. A figure the record does not support stays [open] and links nothing.
- Grid & consumer energy (US EIA)Reference dataset