HARRISBURG, Pa. The group said in a statement that work should start this year and that power might be on by 2027. The initial $10 billion investment might not cover the full cost of getting the site ready and building the data centres, the group said.
The group said that a lot of the important equipment for the project is already in place at the now-closed Homer City power plant. This includes transmission lines that connect to the mid-Atlantic and New York power grids, substations and access to water.
The group also said that it could provide energy to the wider power grid, but they didn’t say which data centres they were sure would use it or how much of its electricity could end up going to the wider grid.
A $5 million state grant was given to the developers to bring a gas line to the land, which is near major interstate gas pipelines and sits on top of the Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoir. The ordered turbines for the planned plant, on the other hand, can run on a mix of hydrogen and other fuels.
The group took down the three cooling towers and four smokestacks that were still standing from the old coal plant last month. After 54 years of business, it shut down in 2023.
The owners, Homer City Development, said it was because of cheaper natural gas, unusually warm winters that used less power, the rising cost of coal and rules that make the environment more expensive.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was made with help from Microsoft’s data centres and came out in late 2022, sparked a worldwide demand for chatbots and other generative AI products that need a lot of computer power to train and run.
Because of this, big tech companies are looking for new power sources. This has sparked interest in a new wave of nuclear reactors, brought back the idea of building new gas-fired plants, and made states and federal officials worry about power shortages.
It’s also caused companies to put off shutting down old power plants and bring nuclear power plants back online. For example, last year it was announced that the closed Three Mile Island nuclear power plant would reopen under a 20-year deal to power Microsoft’s data centres.
— The owners of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant announced on Wednesday that they are going to turn it into a $10 billion natural gas-powered data centre campus. The goal is to take advantage of Big Tech companies’ rapidly growing energy needs to power AI and cloud computing applications.
People who own the old Homer City Generating Station, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometres) east of Pittsburgh, say that it will have seven gas-fired turbines that will provide up to 4.5 gigawatts of energy to data centres on the property.
That much electricity could power three million homes. Federal data shows that it would be the biggest gas-fired power plant in the country and the third-biggest power plant in the country, after the Grand Coulee water dam in Washington and the new Plant Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.
State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, whose district includes Homer City, said the project would be the biggest investment in capital ever made in Pennsylvania.
