The owners of a recently demolished coal-fired power plant announced the site will become a data center powered by the largest natural gas plant in the country.
The Homer City Generating Station in Indiana County was decommissioned in 2023 and parts of it were imploded last month. It had been at one time the largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania.
The plant’s owners, Homer City Redevelopment, announced the site will become a 3,200-acre data center campus for artificial intelligence and other computing needs.
“We always hoped something would be big here, but this is monumental. This is putting us on the map,” said Robin Gorman, vice president for government affairs for Homer City Redevelopment.
Gorman said the campus will be powered by a 4.5 gigawatt natural gas power plant, more than twice the capacity as the former coal plant once generated.
“Eventually the future vision is to create a business park and to attract data centers, [and] all kinds of information technology companies,” Gorman said.
Local business and labor leaders lauded the project. Homer City Redevelopment says it will create 10,000 construction jobs in quote “the largest capital investment in the history of Pennsylvania.”
“You’re talking about roughly 3,000 to 3,500 construction jobs initially just to build the power plant,” Gorman said. “Our hope right now, and it’s a low estimate, would be about 1,000 total direct and indirect permanent high paying jobs.”
The site could begin generating power by 2027, the company said.
Homer City Energy Campus. Image: Homer City Redevelopment
Gov. Josh Shapiro said Wednesday at a press conference in Northampton County that his administration has been “engaged with folks at Homer City, and we are pleased to see a project go forward.”
Shapiro said there remained questions about the project, and that the state will need to receive “a lot of permits” from the project.
Shapiro also said he wanted to see more electricity produced in the state for data centers like the one announced for Homer City.
“I want to make sure that we win the battle on AI here in America, and we don’t let China beat us on that front,” he said. “Pennsylvania is going to have something to say about it, because we have energy that can be used to power these data centers, that can be used to power the Gen AI models that we’re going to need in order to win.”
