- A massive project in Pennsylvania seeks to turn an old coal site into a natural gas-powered data center campus
- The project comes as data centers hunt for new sources of power to keep building despite electrical grid constraints
- Old coal sites happen to have several key things data centers need, so we expect this trend to continue
Not to be know-it-alls, but once again we told you this was coming. Yet another old coal site — this time in Pennsylvania — is being transformed into a data center campus. But this one has a twist: it’ll provide a whopping 4.5 gigawatts of power generated by natural gas.
The 3,200-acre site is known as Homer City and will be redeveloped with a $10+ billion investment led by Knighthead Capital. For now, the focus is on demolition and cleanup of the old coal facilities to prepare the site for the eventual construction of new gas power-generation and data center facilities.
Notably, the $10 billion will only cover site preparation. Billions more are likely to be spent on the project, given that data centers tend to cost $10 million to $12 million to build per required megawatt.
Construction is set to start this year, with power coming online by 2027. Apparently, not all of the 4.5GW of power generated at the site will be used for the future data center campus. Homer City’s project site notes that the new natural gas power generation facilities will “supply power to thousands of homes on the local grid while also supporting multiple large data center customers.”
We tried to get more details from the Homer City project team, but they said it's still too early to offer additional information.
Gassing AI ambitions
Though it may be one of the largest projects so far, Homer City isn’t the first coal site to be converted into a data center facility.
Back in September, we highlighted the Data Center Ridge project in Virginia, which aims to transform a 450-acre former coal plant into a natural gas-powered 1 GW data center campus.
At the time, we also flagged a discussion between tech leaders and the White House that included a conversation about repurposing old coal sites for power-hungry data centers. As it turns out, these sites tend to have much of the groundwork already in place for data centers: power, water, transportation and a local workforce.
A month later, S&P Global dropped a report which noted that demand from data centers could drive an incremental need for 3 billion to 6 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas by 2030.
This is already beginning to play out. In February, oil and gas company Energy Transfer inked a deal to supply 1.2 GW of natural gas-generated power to fuel an AI data center CloudBurst is building in Texas. And in an investor presentation published this week, the company noted it has requests to connect around 70 data centers across 12 states.
Put it all together and we think it wouldn’t be a stretch to say there’s likely more of these kinds of projects coming down the pipe — lots more.