PJM to Data Centers: Stop Bailing on the Grid Every Time It Blips
Remember that July morning when 4,000 megawatts (MW) of Northern Virginia data centers yanked themselves off the PJM grid because of a routine, properly cleared fault on a single transmission line (see PJM: Data Centers Panicked, Nearly Crashed the Grid on Purpose)? PJM hasn’t forgotten either. On Sept. 8, PJM’s Planning Committee got its first look at proposed “ride-through” standards that would require big data centers and crypto mines to stay connected and keep drawing power when the grid wobbles — instead of hitting the eject button and running for their diesel generators. And PJM isn’t easing into it: new facilities entering the study process would have to demonstrate compliance starting Nov. 1, 2026 — about five weeks from now. Read More “PJM to Data Centers: Stop Bailing on the Grid Every Time It Blips”
A power company from Thailand just bought a big chunk of a natural gas-fired power plant sitting in Queens, New York — about two miles from LaGuardia Airport. Why should you care? Because the reason that plant is worth so much money is the very thing New York politicians keep telling us is a dead end. The Empire State has spent a decade banning fracking, killing pipelines, and lecturing the rest of us about the evils of methane. And yet: the single most valuable thing about Astoria Energy II is that nobody will ever be allowed to build another one like it. Scarcity, it turns out, pays very well. Somebody in Bangkok did the math. 
Another big data center is heading to western Pennsylvania, and this one plans to make its own power with a natural gas-fired plant, right next door to a shale gas well pad. A Florida LLC and a Coraopolis microgrid company have filed preliminary plans for the Misty Hollow Energy & Data Campus: a 1-million-square-foot data center and a 300-megawatt power generation facility on a former dairy farm along Prospect Road (PA Route 528) in Forward Township, Butler County. The site sits next to a PennEnergy Resources well pad, and the township engineer wants a letter from PennEnergy signing off on the plan’s revised access to that pad. The developer now confirms the 300 MW plant will run on natural gas, and it will power the campus “behind the meter,” off the grid.
Alpha Compute Corp. (Nasdaq: ALP), the tiny AI outfit that wants to build a 200 MW gas-fired data center in Tioga County (see 
Here’s one you don’t see every day. The North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC) has said “no” to a Duke Energy gas-fired power plant. On Sept. 18, the commission voted 3-1 to deny Duke Energy Progress a certificate of public convenience and necessity (CPCN, the state’s permission slip to build) for a 255-megawatt (MW) gas-fired “peaker” turbine at the Smith Energy Complex in Richmond County. Price tag: $584 million. The twist? The three commissioners who voted no are all Republican appointees, and the lone vote in favor came from a Democrat. Nobody on the commission said gas is the problem. The problem, they said, is data centers: how much of this plant’s power data centers will use, and who would pay for it. 
NextEra Energy took its $13 billion, 3,750-megawatt (MW) East Riverside Energy Center to the people on Tuesday night, and the people showed up. Hundreds of Fayette County residents filled Brownsville Area High School for their first look at what would be one of the largest gas-fired power plants in the country. They got poster boards, experts to chat with, and a five-minute slideshow every hour. What they didn’t get was a microphone for questions. We picked up a few new details, including one that producers and pipeline companies should read twice. 
The Upper Burrell Township (Westmoreland County, PA) Planning Commission hit the pause button Tuesday on recommending the township’s latest draft data center ordinance. The delay gives residents time to email their wish lists to supervisors before an Oct. 7 meeting. Supervisors hope to pass the ordinance at a special meeting in October, ahead of the Nov. 2 end of their data center moratorium, and Westmoreland County gets a say, too. The rules won’t touch TECfusions’ existing operations at the former Alcoa/Arconic campus, but they would govern new development there. Buried in the 26-page draft is a line that should make every Marcellus/Utica (M-U) driller and landowner sit up: every new data center must supply its own baseload power. And the township says its next project is writing rules for power plants. 
Yesterday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that rips out the heart of the Biden administration’s 2024 power plant carbon regulations. Gone is the requirement that new “base load” natural gas-fired power plants and long-lived coal plants capture 90% of their carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2032. EPA says the repeal will save $310 billion. At the same time, EPA proposed scrapping every remaining greenhouse gas standard for power plants, which it says would save another $370 million. For the Marcellus/Utica, where a parade of big gas-fired power plants is lining up to feed AI data centers, this is very good news. 
Remember Synapse Energy Economics? That’s the Massachusetts consulting outfit that, back in 2023, was paid by two Big Green groups to produce a “report” claiming Pennsylvania’s RGGI carbon tax would lower your electric bill (see 
We told you back in July that the two landowners fighting the 2,180-megawatt (MW) Canadys Station gas-fired power plant in South Carolina’s Lowcountry were teeing up an appeal straight to the state Supreme Court (see 
Back in March, MDN told you that New Fortress Energy (NFE) had entered a voluntary UK Restructuring Plan — the British cousin of a U.S. prepackaged bankruptcy (see 
Pittsburgh-based Alcoa says it’s “very close” to selling its shuttered Massena East aluminum smelter in New York’s North Country to a data center developer. Here’s the part that other reporting left out: the buyer has been sitting on that site since 2017, wants to build a 635-megawatt (MW) computing campus there — and Gov. Kathy Hochul froze the whole thing two months ago with her data center moratorium (see 
Duke Energy just handed Marcellus/Utica producers something more useful than another press release. It handed us a calendar. Back in July we told you Duke had picked its sites: two 1,360-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle gas plants on its Davie County, North Carolina parcel, and the largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage facility in company history directly across the Yadkin River in Davidson County (see 
Round and round she goes. Yesterday Shell Energy North America (SENA) announced it is doing two deals at once: selling the 609-megawatt (MW) Rhode Island State Energy Center (RISEC) near Providence to Constellation Energy for $715 million, and buying the 169-MW Hunlock Creek Energy Center in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, from Castleton Commodities International (CCI). Shell has owned the Rhode Island plant for all of about 20 months. CCI has owned Hunlock Creek for two years. Both deals are expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, pending the usual regulatory blessings.