The Grid Behind Ohio’s Business Boom

Happy Tuesday.

The build this week: CNBC named Ohio America’s top state for business this year, and every factory weighing a move there runs on the grid. I went to FirstEnergy’s Distribution Control Center near Akron to see how the utility keeps the lights on today while planning for the growth coming next.

Underneath: AEP, Amazon and X-energy will study building 12 small reactors on an Indiana coal plant site that has sat idle since 1994. BAE Systems and the Pentagon agreed on a path to as many as 25,000 APKWS guidance kits a year, TSMC said its second Arizona fab will start volume production ahead of plan, Hewlett Packard Enterprise will spend $75 million to build more AI hardware in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and Centrus Energy bought the company that makes its centrifuge casings.

The Lead

The big picture: In July, CNBC ranked Ohio its No. 1 state for business for the first time since the study launched in 2007. Infrastructure carried the most weight in the scoring, and Ohio ranked first in that category too. Companies that come to Ohio to build or expand need power that is reliable, ready and affordable. Delivering all three at once is one of the most important jobs in the state.

How it’s done: Torrence L. Hinton is president of FirstEnergy Ohio, made up of Ohio Edison, the Illuminating Company and Toledo Edison. Together they deliver power to more than 2.1 million customers across the state, from Cleveland to Toledo and south toward Springfield. Hinton came to Ohio in 2024 after leading Peoples Gas in Chicago. “What we’re seeing is businesses outside of Ohio interested in locating in Ohio,” he told me at the company’s Distribution Control Center near Akron. “We’re also seeing existing businesses thinking about expansion, and what that all relies on is reliable energy.”

Behind the scenes: The Distribution Control Center is the situation room where FirstEnergy Ohio watches its system in real-time, tracking outages and dispatching crews. The work changes from place to place. In cities, more of the grid runs underground. In the rest of the territory, overhead lines are exposed to storms. “What we’ve started to see is a huge increase in weather events in the state, I think, threefold over the recent years,” Hinton said. Trees are a top cause of outages, and FirstEnergy has proposed a plan that sets aside about $83 million a year for trimming near power lines. Instead of rebuilding everything, the company targets the oldest and worst-performing parts of the system. “It’s not a complete system makeover, but we know there’s certain parts of our system that is more aged than other parts,” Hinton said. That means replacing poles, wires, transformers and breakers, and adding smart meters and grid technology that cut the time it takes to restore power after an outage.

Why it matters: Hinton said companies new to Ohio want the utility in the room when they look at sites, and he has joined JobsOhio and Team NEO at the table this year. His message to prospects: “If you need additional capacity, we’re going to work with you. You’re going to be top of mind.” He acknowledged the utility has room to move faster. It has already shortened some connection timelines and plans to shorten them further. Grid investment also has an economic impact of its own: a recent study commissioned by the company credits FirstEnergy’s Ohio work with supporting 35,000 jobs, $3.1 billion in wages and benefits, and $7.7 billion in state GDP.

Yes, but: Affordability is the question Hinton hears most. “I understand those concerns, and those are real concerns,” he said. His answer starts with who controls what. FirstEnergy delivers power but doesn’t generate it, and supply is where bills have climbed fastest. From 2021 to 2025, Hinton said, the supply portion of customers’ bills “increased about 13% every single year, whereas the portions that we control on average has increased less than 1%.”

What’s next: FirstEnergy has proposed its first three-year rate plan under House Bill 15, a 2025 law that lets Ohio utilities set rates based on forecasted spending instead of only past costs. The plan averages about $800 million a year for poles, wires and grid technology. If it’s approved, FirstEnergy estimates residential bills would grow more slowly through 2030 than the 10-year average U.S. inflation rate of 3.3%. “It doesn’t have to be a choice between reliability and affordability,” Hinton said.

To make the split clear, FirstEnergy is seeking approval for a redesigned bill that separates its distribution charges from generation and other costs it doesn’t control. Customers “may get one bill, and on the outside it has FirstEnergy Ohio,” Hinton said, but under the new design, “the components of the bill are very clear.”

🎥 Watch: FirstEnergy Ohio’s Torrence Hinton

Defense & Space

• BAE Systems signed a long-term framework with the Pentagon to raise production of APKWS laser-guidance kits, which turn unguided rockets into precision weapons, to as many as 25,000 a year, or 35,000 with allied orders.

• Lockheed Martin won Army Milestone C approval for the Extended-Range GMLRS, clearing the 150-kilometer rocket for production and fielding on HIMARS and M270 launchers.

• Lockheed Martin delivered the first C-130J-30 that the Navy will convert into an E-130J from its plant in Marietta, Georgia, the first of three the Navy has bought so far for the TACAMO nuclear command mission.

• Epirus won an $18 million Army contract to put its Leonidas high-power microwave counter-drone system on vehicles, bringing its Army Leonidas awards since 2023 past $120 million.

• EraDrive won a $13 million Space Force award through the APFIT procurement program to buy its Era-Node autonomy modules, a fast move into production funding for the Stanford spinout.

• Michigan announced a Space Innovation Hub at Newlab in Detroit, backed by a state grant of nearly $1.2 million, to give space startups and manufacturers testing, supplier support and a talent pipeline when it opens Oct. 28.

Maritime & Shipbuilding

• HII's Ingalls Shipbuilding won a $99 million contract modification to take the Zumwalt-class destroyer Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG 1002) through sea trials in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the ship is being fitted with the Navy's Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic weapon.

• HD Hyundai and Anduril ran a 3.5-hour autonomous ship demonstration off Long Beach, California, pairing HD Hyundai's autonomy software with Anduril's Lattice on a 368-ton test vessel for Navy and Coast Guard observers.

• MARTAC will supply Devil Ray T24 unmanned boats to Taiwan's Coast Guard under a co-production deal, with some of the boats built in Edgewater, Florida.

• Crowley took delivery of the ship-assist tug Venture from Diversified Marine in Portland, Oregon, the latest in a series of U.S.-built tugs working the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Semiconductors & Electronics

• TSMC said its second Arizona fab will reach volume production in the third quarter of 2027, slightly ahead of plan, as work moves forward on a third fab and its first advanced packaging plant in Arizona.

• Infineon signed a multi-year deal to buy 200-millimeter silicon carbide wafers from Wolfspeed, moving the companies' long supply relationship to larger wafers.

• Boise State University won a $2.7 million NextFlex and Air Force Research Laboratory award to build RAVEN, a shared center for electronics that have to work in extreme environments.

Manufacturing & Automation

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise will invest $75 million in its Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, plant over five years to add manufacturing, testing and warehouse space for AI and high-performance computing systems, creating 75 jobs with help from up to $5.1 million in state tax credits.

• Caterpillar committed up to $10 million to train manufacturing workers in North Carolina, working with Central Carolina Community College and the Sanford Area Growth Alliance.

• North Carolina awarded $2.2 million in rural infrastructure grants tied to $504 million in private investment, led by Reckitt's renovation of a 310,000-square-foot building in Wilson.

• Discovery 2 Scale will open an AI and robotics materials lab at Nambé Pueblo in New Mexico, backed by a $500,000 state grant and expected to bring more than 80 jobs.

• Agility Robotics chose Nyobolt batteries for its Digit 5 humanoid robot, cutting a full charge to nine minutes so the robot can work more than 20 hours a day.

Energy & Materials

• AEP, Amazon and X-energy will study building a 960-megawatt nuclear plant with 12 of X-energy’s Xe-100 reactors at the former Breed coal plant in Sullivan County, Indiana, idle since 1994. Amazon will fund development work and intends to buy the plant’s power, and the project would bring more than 1,000 construction jobs and more than 100 permanent ones if the partners decide to build. Read AEP’s announcement.

• The Energy Department offered up to $50 million in Defense Production Act funds to upgrade existing power lines in Virginia and West Virginia, adding about 290 megawatts of capacity on Appalachian Power's Virginia system.

• Alcoa agreed to sell part of its idle Massena East site in New York for up to $315 million, and CEO Bill Oplinger said a data center would be built on the land, which has been idle since 2014.

• Mercuria delivered the first 12,000 metric tons of copper into Project Vault, the U.S. critical minerals reserve backed by a $10 billion Export-Import Bank loan.

• The Energy Department committed up to $42 million in Defense Production Act funds to advance the Constitution Pipeline, a roughly 125-mile natural gas line from Pennsylvania to New York.

• Fodere Critical Minerals picked Prairie, Mississippi, for its first prototype plant, agreeing to option terms on a 56-acre site where it plans to recover titanium dioxide and vanadium from industrial waste.

• Arizona State, Purdue and the University of Tennessee formed a nuclear education consortium to train the workforce for new reactors and pursue federal funding together.

Supply Chain & Freight

• The Port of Long Beach handled 997,177 twenty-foot container units in September, the busiest month in its 115-year history, pushing it and Los Angeles to a combined record of more than 2 million.

Dealbook

• Centrus Energy bought Westerman Holdings for about $116 million, bringing in the supplier that makes its centrifuge casings, along with about 400 workers at plants in Ohio, Oklahoma and Wyoming.

• Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation in a round led by Trace Capital and Innovation X to scale its AI chips.

• Mueon raised a $65 million Series A led by Maverick Silicon, with Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel joining, to move the Portland, Oregon, startup's stackable computing hardware toward production.

• Austin Sensing Company came out of stealth with $15 million to build counter-drone sensors in a 20,000-square-foot factory in Austin, Texas.

• Amaero raised about $20 million in a Nasdaq IPO, with about $10 million going to equipment at its metal powder plant in McDonald, Tennessee.

• NexTech Solutions bought Halcyon Days Consulting, adding more than 90 engineers, operators and mission specialists who run tactical military networks to the Huntsville, Alabama, defense contractor.

• System One bought GMP, a capital project planning firm in Greer, South Carolina, that works on data centers and advanced manufacturing plants.

• Project Vault is preparing up to $1 billion in loans for more than a dozen U.S. manufacturers in its first round, with talks under way with more than 70 companies.

Back Thursday.