Before members of the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association (OMA) gathered at Cenovus’s Lima Refinery for this week’s Energy Committee meeting, OMA President Ryan Augsburger and Dave O’Neil, OMA director of communications, stopped by The Lima News to talk about what Ohio manufacturers are seeing on electric bills.

The message was plain. Higher costs should not be used to scare Ohio into bad energy policy.

In the interview, Augsburger pushed back on the utility-driven claim that Ohio is facing an unavoidable energy crisis. He said the real concern is whether monopoly utilities are using inflated forecasts and speculative data center demand to justify more spending that customers could be forced to fund, whether the load ever shows up or not.

“The name of the game is to create a false narrative where people believe we’ve got an energy crisis,” Augsburger told The Lima News.

OMA is urging policymakers and regulators to slow down, demand proof and require independent review of utility forecasts before customers are handed the bill. 5/28/2026