Ridgeline Nears Startup; Court Shreds Ruling Against TVA Gas Plant
One year ago today, we told you construction had started on Enbridge’s 122-mile Ridgeline Expansion Project in Tennessee (see Construction Begins on 122-Mile East Tennessee Pipeline Project). Now the pipe is just about ready to flow. Natural Gas Intelligence (NGI) reports that East Tennessee Natural Gas, an Enbridge company, could place Ridgeline into service as early as Nov. 1, delivering 300,000 dekatherms per day (Dth/d, roughly 300 MMcf/d, or million cubic feet per day) to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston site. NGI mentions the other big news only in passing, so we’ll give it the spotlight: last Friday, a federal appeals court let construction continue on the $2.5 billion gas plant this pipeline feeds, and took apart, piece by piece, the reasoning of the judge whose ruling threatened to stop it. Read More “Ridgeline Nears Startup; Court Shreds Ruling Against TVA Gas Plant”
The Upper Burrell Township (Westmoreland County, PA) Planning Commission voted 5-0 Tuesday night to recommend the township’s data center ordinance, handing it to the three township supervisors. The supervisors hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. tonight (Oct. 22), followed by a special meeting to consider adopting it. They’re racing the clock: the township’s data center moratorium expires Nov. 2, just 11 days from now. Last month we told you the draft quietly requires every new data center to make its own around-the-clock (“baseload”) power, which in southwest Pennsylvania means natural gas. As best we can tell, that requirement survived. 
On Monday, the Pennsylvania Democrat-controlled House took a tax bill the Senate sent over in June, gutted it, and sent back something very different. The new version has a 2-cent-per-kilowatt-hour fee on big electricity users (read: data centers), a grab bag of “clean energy” tax credits from Gov. Shapiro’s wish list, and a gas-fired power plant credit so wrapped in strings it may never pay out a dime. The House vote was 193-10. The Republican-controlled Senate had two voting days on the calendar before the Nov. 3 election: yesterday and today. The Republican-controlled Senate left the bill in its Rules Committee on Tuesday and instead passed 17 other measures. Today is its last scheduled day of voting before the Nov. 3 election. We don’t see any signs they will take up this bill today, but one never knows. 
Back on Sept. 1, we told you Dominion Energy’s monster 3,000-megawatt (3 gigawatt) gas-fired power plant in Cumberland County, Virginia, had cleared its first hurdle when the county planning commission voted 5-1 to recommend approval (see 
The PJM Interconnection, the outfit that runs the power grid for 13 states plus Washington, D.C. (including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia), had a rough week last week. Unusually warm October weather, combined with a big chunk of power plants down for fall maintenance, pushed PJM into emergency mode on October 13 and 14. The lights stayed on. But PJM says weeks like this are becoming normal, because electricity demand from data centers is growing faster than new power plants and power lines are being built. PJM’s answer? More power plants. 
Last month we told you Ohio had asked PJM to dust off the “State Agreement Approach,” a grid-planning tool invented for New Jersey’s offshore wind, and use it instead for the $4.2 billion in power lines feeding the 10-gigawatt SoftBank data center and gas plant complex at Piketon (see 
The Homer City Energy Campus in Indiana County, PA, will be one of the country’s largest natural gas-fired power plants under construction. It burns Marcellus gas, and it needs a lot of water to keep cool. On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) held a public hearing on a permit change that would let the plant send up to 6.8 million gallons a day of used cooling water into Blacklick Creek. All of the roughly a dozen speakers opposed it. DEP says it will decide before the current permit expires at the end of this year. Here’s what the opponents said, and what DEP’s own paperwork says, which is a different story. 
Another data center proposal has landed in Westmoreland County, PA. This one is a 1.1-million-square-foot building on old farmland in South Huntingdon Township, right off I-70 and across the road from the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival. The developers are Sippel Development Co. of Zelienople and TriEnergy of Sewickley — the latter a company that has spent roughly 30 years buying land for oil and gas development. The plans filed with the township don’t say where the electricity will come from. But we have a pretty good guess. The site sits about a mile from Tenaska’s 940-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, and gas wells are nearby. Here’s what we know. 
PJM Interconnection, the outfit that runs the electric grid for 13 states (including PA, OH and WV) plus DC, has picked its first three projects for a brand-new fast lane to get big power plants hooked up to the grid. Two of the three are giant battery projects from ENGIE. The third is the one that caught our eye: LS Power plans to add 455 megawatts (MW) to its existing Hunterstown natural gas-fired power plant near Gettysburg, in Adams County, PA. By MDN’s math, that expansion will need roughly 60 million cubic feet of natural gas per day once it’s up and running. Guess where that gas is coming from? 
On Sept. 22, Alpha Compute Corp. (Nasdaq: ALP) said it was buying an old Pennsylvania oil field (county not named) for $5.5 million and planned to put a second 200 MW data center on it (see