US power marketer Gridmatic has expanded into Ohio, with the launch of its Gridmatic Retail product in the state.

The service will offer both standard and advanced energy contracts to a range of commercial and individual customers, including data centers and other consumers with flexible loads.

The launch marks the company’s first foray into the PJM Interconnection market, the largest wholesale electricity market in the US, spanning 13 states across the East Coast.

“We’re excited to bring our industry-leading forecasting and automation to customers in Ohio,” said Jackson Vo, president of Gridmatic Retail. “Our focus on making it easy for retail energy customers and data centers to reduce costs, strategically manage their energy use, and optimize their flexible loads is a key reason we’ve achieved the level of growth we’ve seen to date.”

Gridmatic Retail uses AI to forecast energy supply, demand, and pricing, providing predictable clean energy contracts for businesses. According to the company, it is designed to reduce costs for a diverse portfolio of commercial and industrial energy users, ranging from large data centers to medium-to-large sized businesses.

The company intends to offer its AI Load Optimizer platform to customers in Ohio. Gridmatic claims that the product, launched in August, can cut consumer energy costs by more than five percent, allowing large energy users to reduce costs through AI and market forecasting.

Its expansion into Ohio is in response to the state's growing data center market. American Electric Power Ohio, the state's largest utility company, forecasts that demand from the data center sector could grow from 600MW in 2024 to 5GW in 2030.

Last month, the utility cut prospective data center demand by half, reporting that its pipeline of interconnection requests had fallen from more than 30GW to 13GW. The result of a new data center tariff approved in July, which requires new data center customers to pay a minimum of 85 percent of the energy they say they need each month, even if they use less, to cover the cost of the infrastructure required to bring electricity to those facilities.

Gridmatic has already signed several agreements with data centers. In June, it signed a 10MW Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Sol Systems in Texas, with a portion of the power supplied to data center developer EdgeConneX under a 24/7 carbon-free energy agreement.