Ohio blocks 5.3 GW of clean power as PJM data-center demand climbs

Ohio blocks 5.3 GW of clean power as PJM data-center demand climbs An Ohio Supreme Court rejection of an 800-MW solar permit caps a state blockade that strips future supply from PJM just as AI load accelerates. The Ohio Supreme Court blocked the permit for the 800-megawatt Oak Run Solar Project the week of 2026-05-25, Canary Media reported on 2026-06-05. The project, slated to be the state's largest solar installation, is not dead. The court reversed only part of the decision, leaving a pathway to completion.⁵ That matters for PJM because Ohio sits inside the grid operator's footprint, and the state has now stalled roughly 5.3 GW of clean-energy capacity through court rulings, county bans and developer withdrawals. Eight rulings alone killed more than 1.1 GW of solar generation. Developers pulled five further applications worth about another 1 GW after the Power Siting Board's staff signaled denial.⁵ The policy machinery is deliberate. Governor Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 52, which lets counties ban new solar projects above 50 MW and wind farms able to produce more than 5 MW. A 2014 law that more than doubled property-line setbacks for wind turbines had already blocked over 3.3 GW of utility-scale projects in the state.⁵ Supply restraint would be a footnote if demand were flat. It is not. Data centres consume about 5% of America's electricity, up from 2% a decade ago, and the IEA estimates they account for roughly half of US incremental demand growth.^3,1 The pace is the problem. The IEA said data-center electricity demand rose 17% in 2025 from a year earlier, with AI-focused consumption surging 50%. Grid Strategies projects the US data-center market will add between 65 GW and 90 GW by 2029.^1,2⁴ New supply cannot move at that speed even where it is welcome. Only 13% of the generation capacity that filed interconnection requests between 2000 and 2019 had reached commercial operation by the end of 2024, while 77% was withdrawn. The country needs about 5,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission, and regional operators have asked for more time to meet a transmission-upgrade deadline set in late 2021.^1,2 So the cleanest, lowest-marginal-cost additions are exactly the ones Ohio is turning away, while the load that would have absorbed them keeps arriving. That leaves thermal generation setting the price on the margin, and real-time prices in PJM more exposed to fuel costs than they would be with several gigawatts of zero-marginal-cost solar in the stack.^5,1 None of this points to a one-way move. EnergyReader's signal read on PJM real-time is mixed, bearish weight modestly ahead of bullish. Blocked solar removes future megawatts, not current ones, and the demand ramp is a multi-year build. The grid that data centers are straining is the grid that exists, not the one Ohio just declined to enlarge.⁵ The risk is asymmetric over a longer horizon. If county bans under SB 52 keep compounding and the Oak Run pathway narrows, PJM enters its data-center decade short the cheapest capacity it could have added. Watch whether Oak Run clears its remaining path, the rate of new county moratoria, and whether regional operators win the extension that would let upgrades, and queued generation, finally move.^5,2