Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern
June 4, 2026
FRANKFORT—As communities around Kentucky protest planned data centers, a new state energy group says data centers can be part of the state’s future, thanks to its cheap power and available land.
The state can bring in hyperscale data centers while also ensuring electricity ratepayers are protected, the executive director of the Energy Planning and Inventory Commission, or EPIC, said at a Thursday press conference.
“This report is not about whether Kentucky should recruit data centers. That is a decision local officials and local communities, economic developers will make themselves,” said Eric King, a former University of Kentucky executive and the executive director of EPIC. “Kentuckians deserve confidence that growth can occur while existing customers remain protected.”
The 20-page report from EPIC—an agency created in 2024 by the GOP legislative supermajority to analyze energy policy and review requests by utilities to retire fossil fuel-fired power plants—comes as Kentuckians across the state are voicing an outcry against proposed data center projects looking to move into their communities, concerns ranging from impacts to electricity bills and a data center’s significant water usage.
EPIC’s executive committee that leads the agency includes Jeff Brock, an executive from Alliance Resource Partners, the coal company whose CEO is Republican megadonor Joe Craft, and Wesley Cate, the president of the Kentucky Oil and Gas Association. Republican lawmakers argue EPIC is needed to provide independent advice on energy policy. Investor-owned utilities and environmental groups had opposed EPIC’s creation, arguing it creates additional bureaucracy that discourages the retirement of coal and gas-fired power plants.
Kentucky’s utilities have reported as many as 30 data centers are looking at setting up shop in the state with a potentially enormous power demand when added together.
Republican lawmakers at the press conference said this report would help inform their research over the interim session on whether they need to intervene, when the legislature reconvenes at the start of next year, to protect electricity ratepayers.
“We’re in a learning position, and I think we’re still taking in information to figure out if there is a need for it or not,” said state Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson. “We want to make the right decision. We want to protect ratepayers.”
Mills said utilities have addressed electricity ratepayer protections “to a certain extent.” Electric utilities including Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities, East Kentucky Power Cooperative and Kentucky Power argue their internal regulations are already protective of other ratepayers from bearing infrastructure costs to serve data centers.
No protections passed this year
The state legislature this year did not pass any legislation to regulate potential environmental or ratepayer impacts from hyperscale data centers. A Republican-sponsored bill that had passed the Kentucky House of Representatives this year but died on the final day of this year’s legislative session would have required utilities to ensure other ratepayers don’t bear the infrastructure costs of data centers.
Mills and Sen. Steve West, R-Paris, said the bill didn’t make it through the session largely because of “timing.”
“Sometimes it’s okay to take a step back and let the issue kind of percolate through the interim, have the proper interim committee discussions,” West said.
The report largely compares Kentucky’s electricity regulatory environment with the actions taken by two other states, Ohio and Virginia, that have previously seen a surge of hyperscale data center development.
The report authors wrote that Ohio, unlike Virginia, had implemented “cost allocation rules before significant investment arrived” and therefore took advantage of data center investment “without shifting infrastructure costs to existing customers.” The Cincinnati Enquirer reported last month that Ohioans’ electricity bills have risen about 22% over a recent 12-month period; consumer advocates argue data centers have had a role in that rise, while industry groups argue data centers are being scapegoated.
Rep. Adam Moore, D-Lexington, who sits on the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, told the Lantern he doesn’t believe Kentuckians are adequately protected from the impacts of an influx of data centers, describing the current situation as the “wild west.”
He said local communities, through county governments and planning and zoning bodies, are negotiating with data center developments while having signed non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs. Such agreements prevent the release of specific information about a potential project.
Boyd County residents at a town hall this week lambasted local county judge-executives for having signed NDAs with a hyperscale data center developer that wants to locate in a massive data center campus in a multi-county industrial park.
“The people who live in those communities feel like it’s so underhanded because there is no transparency to it,” Moore said. “There is no set of guardrails that we have put in place to protect their interests.”
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Linda Blackford for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.
