HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The house owners of what was as soon as Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired energy plant mentioned Wednesday that they may flip it right into a $10 billion pure gas-powered information heart campus designed to capitalize on the fast-growing energy demands of Huge Tech firms to energy synthetic intelligence and cloud computing purposes.
The previous Homer Metropolis Producing Station, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Pittsburgh, will host seven gas-fired generators to energy information facilities on web site with as much as 4.5 gigawatts of electrical energy, in response to the house owners, an investor group named Homer Metropolis Growth.
That quantity of electrical energy is sufficient to energy about 3 million properties.
Building is predicted to start this yr and energy might begin flowing by 2027, the group mentioned in an announcement. The fee to arrange the location and construct the information facilities might exceed the preliminary $10 billion funding by billions extra, the group mentioned.
A lot of the crucial infrastructure for the mission is already in place from the shuttered Homer Metropolis energy plant, together with transmission strains related to the mid-Atlantic and New York energy grids, substations and water entry, the group mentioned.
The builders have been awarded a $5 million state grant to increase a gasoline line to the property, which sits atop the prolific Marcellus Shale pure gasoline reservoir.
Final month, the group demolished the three cooling towers and 4 smokestacks nonetheless standing from the previous coal plant. It shut down in 2023 after 54 years in operation.
The house owners, Homer Metropolis Growth, blamed competitors with cheaper pure gasoline, unseasonably heat winters that demanded much less energy, the rising price of coal and more and more costly environmental laws.
The late 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — constructed with help from Microsoft’s data centers — ignited worldwide demand for chatbots and different generative AI merchandise that sometimes require massive quantities of computing energy to coach and function.
That has despatched Huge Tech firms in quest of new energy sources, spurred interest in a brand new wave of nuclear reactors, revived curiosity in constructing new gas-fired plants and stoked concerns among states and federal regulators about electrical energy shortages.
It is also prompted utilities to delay the retirements of growing old energy vegetation and to deliver nuclear energy vegetation out of retirement, together with final yr’s announcement that the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant will reopen below a 20-year settlement to feed Microsoft’s information facilities.
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