Ohio Consumers' Counsel

The Ohio General Assembly created the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel in 1976 as an independent state agency charged with representing residential utility customers before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the state and federal courts. The office is funded by a small assessment on regulated Ohio utilities and operates independently of the governor’s line agencies. Residential ratepayer standing in Ohio utility cases rests primarily with the Consumers’ Counsel, which intervenes in every major rate filing.

The office’s Licking County work began in earnest when AEP Ohio opened its 2024 filing for a data-center tariff. The utility’s proposal would have recovered transmission and generation upgrade costs from its general residential and small-commercial ratepayer base while serving the hyperscaler load that drove the upgrades. The Consumers’ Counsel filed testimony through staff counsel and expert witnesses documenting the load projections, the transmission queue, and the cost shift the utility’s proposal implied.

On July 23, 2025, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio ordered AEP Ohio to adopt a data-center-specific tariff requiring hyperscalers with loads above 25 megawatts to subscribe to firm capacity and to cover at least 85 percent of that subscribed load for twelve years, regardless of actual consumption. The order moved the cost of the transmission and generation upgrades from residential ratepayers to the hyperscalers whose demand required the upgrades. The Consumers’ Counsel’s filings, together with those of the Environmental Law and Policy Center and Ohio Partners for Affordable Energy, built the record the commission relied upon.

The Consumers’ Counsel is a statutory office, not an organizing group, and its method is documentary and procedural rather than mobilizational. The office’s role in the Licking County record is the one Cooper Square’s legal-defense partners played in Manhattan: turn a neighborhood organizing record into admissible testimony, and turn admissible testimony into a regulatory order that has force of law.