Pennsylvania's largest coal-fired power plant demolished: making way for AI data center park construction

The owner of the former largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania announced on Wednesday that they are preparing to transform it into a $10 billion natural gas powered data center park, aimed at harnessing the rapidly growing energy demand of some large tech companies to power artificial intelligence and cloud computing applications.

It is reported that this 1888 MW coal-fired power plant started generating electricity in 1969 and closed in July 2023 after supplying power to Pennsylvania and New York for 54 years. At present, the owner of this power plant has just blasted and demolished the plant to make way for the construction of a large artificial intelligence (AI) data center park, which will now be powered by natural gas. The new power plant will rely on natural gas from the Marcellus shale, a large natural gas field covering parts of Pennsylvania and other states, located near major intercontinental natural gas pipelines to obtain city scale electricity needed to train large AI models. The developer has received a $5 million state grant for the extension of the natural gas pipeline to the property. At the same time, the turbines ordered for the proposed factory can also operate on hydrogen mixed fuel.

According to the owner, an investment group called Homer City Development, the new power plant located about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh will accommodate seven gas turbines and provide up to 4.5 gigawatts of electricity to the on-site data center. This is equivalent to supplying electricity to approximately 3 million households. According to federal data, this will be the largest gas-fired power plant in the United States and the third largest power generation facility after the Great Gulee hydroelectric dam in Washington state and the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Joe Pitman stated that the project will also be the largest capital investment in Pennsylvania's history. His constituency is the location of Homer City.

The group stated in a statement that construction is expected to begin this year and power supply may begin by 2027. The cost of preparing the site and building the data center may exceed the initial investment of $10 billion, adding billions of dollars in investment. At present, most of the key infrastructure for the project is in place, including transmission lines, substations, and water supply channels connected to the Mid Atlantic and New York power grids. The group also stated that it can supply power to a wider grid, but it did not provide any details about any confirmed data center customers and refused to disclose how much electricity its power can ultimately provide to the wider grid.

At the end of 2022, with the help of Microsoft data centers, OpenAI's ChatGPT made its debut, igniting global demand for chatbots and other generative artificial intelligence products that typically require a significant amount of computing power to train and run. This has also prompted some large technology companies to seek new energy sources to boost computing power, and reignited interest in building new gas-fired power plants, but it has also raised concerns among state and federal regulatory agencies about power shortages. At the same time, this has also prompted power companies to postpone the retirement of aging power plants and get nuclear power plants out of retirement status, including the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant announced to be closed last year, which will reopen under a 20-year agreement to meet the needs of Microsoft data centers.