Next NEPA Data Center Land Rush? PPL JV Eyes 29% of Fell Twp.
Over the past seven months, MDN has told you about landowners in Salem Township (Luzerne County) getting rich by selling their land for AI data centers, at prices reaching $250,000 to $300,000 per acre. Now the land rush appears to be spreading about 50 miles northeast, to the “Upvalley” area of Lackawanna County, above Scranton. Invitium Energy, a joint venture (JV) between utility owner PPL Corp. and Blackstone Infrastructure, is under agreement to buy about 2,800 acres in Fell Township. That is nearly 29% of the entire township! All told, Invitium has deals to buy close to 7,200 acres across five northern Lackawanna County municipalities. The plan? Build big natural gas-fired power plants, possibly with data centers sitting right next door. Read More “Next NEPA Data Center Land Rush? PPL JV Eyes 29% of Fell Twp.”
Back in August, we told you Amazon Web Services (AWS) was “in discussions” to land data centers at the massive Homer City Energy Campus in Indiana County, PA (see 
New Jersey regulators have fined the company building a giant AI data center in Vineland (Cumberland County, South Jersey) $1.07 million for installing and running 62 large natural gas-fired generators without air permits. The NJ Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) calls it “by far the largest” enforcement action ever taken against a data center in the Garden State, and “possibly one of the largest such actions in the nation.” Our math: those 62 engines add up to nearly 123 megawatts (MW) of gas-fired power, running behind the meter at a site that is supposed to become a 300 MW data center serving Nebius and, through Nebius, Microsoft. The developer, DataOne, says the engines are temporary until Bloom Energy fuel cells (which also run on natural gas) take over, and it will now apply for permits. 
Meta’s energy chief closed 
Last month we told you DTE Energy was about to ask Michigan regulators for permission to build two new natural gas-fired power plants totaling 2,100 megawatts (MW) (see 
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 
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. 
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.