Louisville Gas and Electric Company (LG&E) announced a contract to supply electricity to its first hyperscale data center customer yesterday. A joint venture between PowerHouse Data Centers and Poe Companies is developing a cutting-edge 400-megawatt (MW) data center campus in Louisville. The first 130 MW will be available in October 2026. While no mention was…
Read More...We have some exciting news to share. Datacenter builder/operator TECfusions, based in Tampa, Florida, has purchased 1,395 acres in Upper Burrell (Westmoreland County), PA, for a groundbreaking data center project called TECfusions Keystone Connect. The site is the old Alcoa R&D campus and surrounding real estate in New Kensington. The project will transform the shuttered…
Read More...Faced with the possibility of blackouts, Connecticut’s Democrat Governor, Ned Lamont, wants to keep his nuclear and gas-fired power plants. But Lamont isn’t interested in building more pipelines or new gas-fired plants. That’s a bridge too far for Lamont. He’s happy to allow the residents of Connecticut to continue paying some of (perhaps THE) highest…
Read More...If you’ve read MDN for any time, you’ve come across at least a few articles about gas-fired power. Nationwide, natural gas produces 43.1% of all electricity, the number one source of electric generation (see this EIA page). Nuclear is number two, producing 18.6% of all electricity. Coal is number three, producing 16.2%. Wind produces 10.2%…
Read More...Last fall, MDN began tracking the issue of who, ultimately, should pay to build out new electricity sources for data centers (and AI) that increasingly use huge amounts of power (see Big Tech and Big Utility Tangle in Ohio re Data Center Electricity and Big Tech Not Happy with OH Utility Counterproposal re Data Centers)….
Read More...The Pittsylvania County Planning Commission voted on Jan. 7 to recommend against granting Virginia-based Balico permission to proceed with a $8.85 billion project to build a data center complex. Last October, Balico applied to rezone more than 2,200 acres for a proposed campus that would include its own massive on-site gas-fired power plant complex using…
Read More...Last October, Shell signed an agreement to buy 100% of RISEC Holdings’ 609-megawatt (MW) two-unit combined-cycle gas turbine power plant located near Providence, Rhode Island (see Shell Buys Gas-Fired Power Plant Near Providence, Rhode Island). Shell wants to buy the plant out of self-interest. The company supplies natural gas to the plant. Shell would be…
Read More...In June 2021, MDN told you about CenterPoint Energy, a power generator looking to shutter portions of its coal-fired generation fleet and build two natural gas combustion turbines in Indiana (see Will New 460 MW Gas-Fired Plant in Indiana Get Approved?). The two units would provide a combined 460 megawatts (MW) of electricity as a…
Read More...Liberal New England, one of the bluest (Democrat) areas of the country, continues to do the opposite of what they preach. For years, New England states like Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut have blocked new natural gas pipelines that would carry Marcellus molecules from a few hundred miles away into their states, claiming they seek to…
Read More...Here’s a story in the karma-is-a-boomerang department… In July 2019, the Connecticut Siting Council approved the Killingly Energy Center gas-fired power plant project after initially rejecting it (see Connecticut Approves New Natgas-Fired Electric Plant in Killingly). The Killingly project would have built a 650-megawatt gas-fired plant in eastern Connecticut. The Siting Council recognized that some…
Read More...We’re just now learning the good news about decisions by two different North Carolina agencies to approve four new gas-fired power plants that utility giant Duke Energy wants to build at two different N.C. sites. In early December, the N.C. Utilities Commission issued orders deeming the gas plants necessary at both sites. Then, on Dec….
Read More...Dominion Energy plans to build small “peaker” electric generating plants in Chesterfield County, VA, near Richmond (see Dominion Plans to Build 1,000-MW Gas Peaker Plant Near Richmond, VA). The Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center (CERC) calls for building four 250-megawatt gas-fired power plants (1,000 MW total) that can jump into action during the coldest and hottest…
Read More...In typical sleazy politician fashion, PA’s Democrat Governor, Josh Shapiro, is blaming someone else (the PJM grid operator, in this case) for problems that he and his predecessor have created. Shapiro recently filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) alleging PJM is mismanaging the grid and using inflated numbers that will cause…
Read More...The dataheads (sounds better than geeks or eggheads) at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published an interesting analysis on Friday detailing which states export the most and import the most electricity. In 2023, Pennsylvania exported 83.4 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity to other states in the PJM electric grid. That’s roughly 26% of all…
Read More...The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released its 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment? (LTRA) yesterday. The LTRA highlights *critical* reliability challenges that the power industry is facing over the next 10 years, including satisfying escalating energy growth, managing generator retirements, and removing barriers to resource and transmission development. The LTRA concludes that well over half…
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