Only weeks after the smokestacks and cooling towers that served Pennsylvania’s largest coal plant were torn down last month, an enormous gas-fired power plant was announced at the site about an hour east of Pittsburgh, in Homer City.  

If completed by 2027, the planned 4.5 gigawatt plant, large enough to power about 3 million homes, will become America’s largest methane-powered electric generation facility – and a continuing source of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Most of the $10 billion plant’s generation will go to powering a nearby data center, one of several being rapidly built across the country to keep up with the computer processing demands of artificial intelligence. Driven in part by AI’s ravenous appetite for electricity, data centers could devour up to 12 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2028, up from about 4.4 percent in 2023, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report released in December 2024.  

More than 200 proposed natural gas power plants have been announced recently across the U.S. to help power the AI data center market. The bitcoin industry is also consuming a growing amount of electricity, already using more power than the city of Los Angeles and rising. Both are throwing a wrench in efforts to reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels and switch to cleaner fuels and energy conservation to combat climate change.

The demand for electricity for AI and bitcoin has become so high that natural gas turbine manufacturers are struggling to keep up, with some power producers looking for alternative power sources for data centers.  

A recent Reuters examination of 13 major U.S. electric utilities found that nearly half have received requests from data centers for power supplies that exceed their current peak demand or generation capacity.  

President Trump’s tariffs on materials such as steel may increase the costs and timelines for construction for gas new power plants.  

Keren Feridun, co-founder of an environmental group called the Better Path Coalition, said she is opposed to the Homer City gas plant and highly skeptical that the investment in data centers will pay off. Pennsylvania has invested $5 million in taxpayer funds toward the Homer City gas plant’s infrastructure.

“Data centers are the new cracker plants,” said Feridun, referring to ethane crackers, which convert natural gas into ethylene, a key building block for plastics. “The state government is always desperate to find new ways to keep the natural gas industry alive. It’s likely that data centers will disappoint our leaders who will have to scramble to find another excuse to drill and frack.”

Just this month, Microsoft announced that it was cancelling its plans for three data centers in Ohio. Some industry experts have predicted that as AI models improve, the technology may require less computing power, which could mean that many of the proposed gas plants are not even needed.

Feridun said it would be good for Pennsylvanians if the data centers never materialize because they “would deplete clean water supplies, gobble up land, and use an obscene amount of electricity.”

The Homer City project developers, which include New York-based investment firm Knighthead Capital Management, LLC, estimate that the power generation construction and site preparation work will exceed $10 billion over the next five years. But the developers have not yet announced a data center customer. Instead, the developers say the 3,200-acre campus will be ready with the necessary infrastructure once a client is found.  

“This project will honor Homer City’s place in the proud history of Pennsylvania energy generation, while accelerating the state and local community’s ability to meet the needs of a rapidly shifting energy landscape," HCR President and CEO William Wexler said in a press release.

Alex Bomstein, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania-based Clean Air Council, said it’s a shame Homer City is going from hosting a very large and heavily polluting coal-fired power plant, which only retired a few years ago, to being the proposed site of the largest gas-fired power plant in the country. He said the toxic emissions from the facility will harm public health and the plant will also contribute to continued greenhouse gas emissions.  

The former coal plant reported releasing 1.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023 (the most recent available year in EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program). Although the developers claim the new gas-fired plant will release about half that amount, it will still mean large quantities of climate-warming pollution, especially compared to clean energy sources that could replace it, like solar or wind power.    

Bomstein said if these large data centers must be built to power artificial intelligence computing, solar power with battery storage of electricity is a much smarter option, because it is “better for the environment and cheaper to run over the long term.”

“Gas requires a large fuel price year after year,” Bomstein said. “And eventually the gas runs out and you have to put in solar anyway. There’s not a limitless supply of gas even in Pennsylvania.”

The Homer City gas plant would utilize gas from the Marcellus Shale, the largest natural gas field in the U.S. Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the U.S., behind Texas, and the Keystone state has three dozen gas-fired power plants already operating.

At an event announcing the Homer City gas plant, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said he wants to “make sure that we win the battle on AI here in America, and we don’t let China beat us on that front.”

Feridun said Shapiro’s all-of-the-above energy plan is a relic left over from the Obama era when it was already out of touch with the reality of impending climate chaos.

“The sad reality is that Pennsylvania lags behind the rest of the country in renewable energy production and our governor is doing nothing about it,” she said. “Instead, he chases after fossil fuel projects.”

A September 2024 report from the Sierra Club on how to achieve a more climate-friendly  power grid demands more clean energy from large companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech firms driving data center growth across the country.

“The US is in the middle of a major transition in the electric sector away from high-emissions coal and gas plants to clean energy and storage,” states the report. “However, the pace of that transition could be at risk if utilities seek to meet new demands for electricity with fossil energy, rather than clean portfolios that meet customers’ demands for both energy and capacity during every hour.”

President Trump presents another major obstacle to the clean energy transition. Since arriving in office in January, he has disrupted clean energy development by rolling back numerous environmental regulations and promoting fossil fuel production, including through a series of executive orders.  

Most recently, on April 8, Trump issued an executive order aimed at “reinvigorating America’s beautiful clean coal industry." The next day, he issued an executive order to “unleash American energy” by directing agencies to sunset federal energy regulations and allowing agencies to repeal certain regulations without letting the public to weigh in. These proposals have already drawn legal pushback from environmental organizations promising to fight them in court.

Photo Credit: Homer City Generating Station from US 119 - Indiana, PA. flickr/Jon Dawson https://www.flickr.com/photos/jmd41280/7187870284/in/photostream/