Veolia Lands 350 MW OH Microgrid 6 Days After Paying Antero $371M
On July 30, French environmental services giant Veolia announced it had been picked by “a major project developer” to operate and maintain a 350-megawatt (MW) microgrid that will power an artificial intelligence data center campus in Ohio. The press release carried a New Albany, Ohio dateline. It’s a genuinely big deal — a behind-the-meter power plant that will supply 100% of a data center campus without leaning on the grid at all. Here’s the dots nobody else has connected. This is the same Veolia that Antero Resources and Antero Midstream spent six years suing over a botched frack wastewater plant in West Virginia. And Veolia announced this shiny new Ohio contract exactly six days after wiring Antero a check for $371 million. You can’t make this stuff up. Read More “Veolia Lands 350 MW OH Microgrid 6 Days After Paying Antero $371M”
PJM Interconnection announced yesterday (Aug. 3) that 715 new power projects totaling more than 200 gigawatts (GW) made it into Cycle 1 of its overhauled interconnection process — the line that generators must stand in before they’re allowed to plug into the grid. The headline number is impressive. The breakdown is more impressive, at least if you own mineral rights in Greene County or run a rig in Belmont County. 
Dominion Energy reported second-quarter 2026 results on July 31, and while Wall Street focused on the penny-counting, there were three items in the release and on the analyst call that matter to Marcellus/Utica producers, midstreamers, and landowners: two new gas-fired power plants moving into permitting, a merger timeline that’s now locked in at the state level, and a nine-figure write-off on renewable assets that tells you which way the wind is actually blowing. 
Let’s be honest — corporate “sustainability reports” are usually 100+ pages of stock photography, buzzwords, and pie charts about employee engagement. We normally give them a wide berth. But Williams released its 2025 Sustainability Report on July 29, and this one is different. Underneath the ESG wrapping paper is a straight-up growth story, and a surprising amount of it runs directly through the Marcellus and Utica. If you’re a landowner in Licking County, a driller in the Utica dry gas window, or anyone who owns WMB shares, there’s real news here. 
For the past two years we’ve heard the same complaint on repeat: those greedy data centers are jacking up your electric bill. State legislators have introduced data center construction bans. Towns have passed moratoriums. A Gallup poll found roughly 70% of Americans don’t want a data center anywhere near them. The White House even got seven big tech companies to sign a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” this past March. Turns out the whole premise may be backward. A new working paper from researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) — Asa Watten, John Bistline, and Geoffrey Blanford — looked at the actual data from 2015 through 2024 and found data centers caused average residential electricity rates to fall. Not rise. Fall. 
DTE Energy reported second quarter 2026 results yesterday, and before we dig in, one piece of housekeeping. DTE used to be an M-U player in a big way — it owned gathering systems in the Marcellus and Utica plus half of the NEXUS pipeline. That business walked out the door on July 1, 2021, when DTE spun it off as DT Midstream (see 
Back in March, we told you about two radical green groups — the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Sierra Club — running to court to block new gas-fired turbines at Georgia Power’s Plant Bowen in Bartow County, Georgia (see 
In January, MDN broke the news that Duke Energy was eyeing a 1,360-megawatt (MW) gas-fired power plant on 1,600 acres in Davidson County, North Carolina (see 
There’s terrific news brewing in Grant County, West Virginia — with an asterisk roughly the size of a cooling tower. Word circulated over the weekend that Dominion Energy plans to build a brand-new natural gas-fired power plant at its Mt. Storm complex, the same site where three coal-fired units have been cranking out electrons since 1965. The key detail: the gas plant would run alongside the coal units, not replace them. That’s more power, not swapped power. We like that math. 
Texas Gas Transmission, LLC, a subsidiary of Boardwalk Pipelines, LP, wants to build the Dearborn County Lateral Project — roughly 12 miles of new 20-inch natural gas pipeline that begins at Texas Gas’s existing system in Dearborn County, Indiana, dips south across the Ohio River into Boone County, Kentucky, then hops back over the river into Hamilton County, Ohio. The destination is Vistra Corp.’s Miami Fort Power Plant, a coal-fired station slated for shutdown until someone had the good sense to convert it to natural gas instead. The lateral would move 265,000 dekatherms per day (Dth/d) of firm transportation service. A dekatherm is roughly one thousand cubic feet of gas, so call it about 265 MMcf/d (million cubic feet per day). Texas Gas filed with FERC in late May. Boone County leaders are not thrilled. 