On a Saturday morning in March, a demolition crew took down the smokestacks at the Homer City Generating Station.
The plant – first commissioned in 1969 – once employed hundreds of workers. In an instant, its soaring smokestacks, a regional landmark in Indiana County, were reduced to rubble.
Ten days later, the plant’s owner, a New York-based financial company called Knighthead Capital Management, announced it would turn the site into the country’s largest natural gas power plant, which will feed both the electric grid and a large data center on its campus to handle computing for artificial intelligence.
The scale of the project could only be described as ‘mega’: $10 billion, and 10,000 construction jobs.
Robin Gorman, vice president for government affairs and public relations for Homer City Redevelopment, Knighthead’s local affiliate that’s rebuilding the site, said that when the former coal plant shut down, it left a hole in the community.
“I think the community just lost hope that there would ever be any refiring or continuation of a coal-fired power plant,” said Gorman, who until recently was an Indiana County Commissioner. “So the fact that the investors decided to reinvest and redevelop this site is monumental.”
It’s not hard to find people in the area who agree.
Rick Fabin, a farmer who lives just over a mile from the plant, is in favor of the project. He remembers when he could reel off the names of manufacturing plants in the area; now he says, there are only a few.
“As long as they’re going to spend money, if it’s going to create jobs and they’re going to hire a lot of local people, you know, hey, ‘Giddy Up,’” Fabin said on a recent afternoon, from the cab of his tractor. “I mean, we need industry here in this county. There’s nothing left in Indiana County.”
Stephanie Mantini is a housekeeping manager at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn in Indiana, Pa. She says activity at the hotel has picked up in recent months because of the redevelopment of the coal plant.
“We have tons of business from workers and from higher-ups that are dealing with it, and they stay at the hotel. We’re going to continue to get business as they build it,” she said. “That also helps my employees because then they have work to do. And it’s just a great thing for Indiana right now.”
Like many in the area, she has a connection to the former coal plant. Mantini’s father once worked there as an electrician. Seeing the site once again revived has been ‘refreshing’, she said.
“No matter if it’s coal or gas. I think it’s a good thing for the area,” Mantini said.
Data center built on fracking
This project is fueled by cheap natural gas from fracking in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, and a rush to build more data centers as artificial intelligence use expands.
Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative, says these centers – basically warehouses filled with computers – are massive energy users.
“A data center can be the size of a factory, but use as much energy as a medium-sized or even a large city,” said Peskoe. “Down in New Orleans, Meta is building a data center that may be as much as two gigawatts. The city of New Orleans is about one gigawatt [of electricity demand].”
Why do data centers need so much electricity? For one, they do a lot of computing, and that generates lots of heat. These centers use air conditioning and chilled water to cool off their equipment.
Peskoe says some companies are trying to power their AI with clean energy, but many, like Homer City and the Meta center in New Orleans, will use natural gas.
“So that obviously increases emissions, particularly because these data centers operate 24-7. So those natural gas plants there are going to be going full tilt.”
The Homer City plant will, if built to capacity, generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity. That’s more than double the old coal plant’s output. Even though gas produces fewer carbon dioxide emissions than coal, Homer City’s plant could become one of the state’s top sources of carbon pollution.
Expanding its footprint
It could also be a big land user. Already at 3200 acres, the project may also be looking for more land.
Dave Bork, a third generation farmer in nearby Center Township, says he’s been approached by the company to sell his family’s 800-acre cattle farm.
His family has relocated farms several times over the years as the coal plant expanded. He says he’s not going to sell.
“Over the course of my years, we’ve sold three farms to them already, and I won’t sell no more. That’s all there is to it,” Bork said.
He’s in favor of the economic benefit the plant will bring to the area, he said, at least in the short term. But he’s not entirely sold yet on the project’s long-term benefits for the surrounding community.
“It may create a lot of jobs that we don’t see, probably not around here. I’m talking like IT tech jobs like that, not [for] people that come from Homer City,” Bork said.
The company says it will create 1,000 full-time jobs, but hasn’t specified where those will be.
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