FERC Greenlights PowerTransitions’ 6th NY Gas Plant, Nobody Objected
Both federal and state regulators signed off last Thursday on PowerTransitions’ purchase of the 1,242-megawatt (MW) Roseton Generating Facility in Newburgh, New York — the sixth and by far the largest gas-fired plant the Houston-based company has grabbed in the Empire State this year. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued its order Aug. 13 (Docket EC26-95-000), and the New York Public Service Commission approved the transfer the same day. But the most interesting thing in the FERC order isn’t the approval. It’s the name of the company doing the buying. Read More “FERC Greenlights PowerTransitions’ 6th NY Gas Plant, Nobody Objected”
PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that keeps the lights on for 67 million people across 13 states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, filed its long-awaited data center framework with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Wednesday, August 13. The short version: if you’re a new data center and you don’t bring your own electricity to the party, you get switched off first when the grid gets tight. Homes and small businesses get cut last. It’s a rule that, read correctly, is one enormous purchase order for Marcellus/Utica gas. 
Here’s a puzzle for you. The Trump EPA has spent 18 months dismantling the Biden administration’s carbon rules for power plants. The final repeal has been parked at the White House Office of Management and Budget since May 14 — and as of this writing it’s still sitting there, past the 90-day review window that ran out on August 12. Everybody in the business assumes it’s a done deal. So why are state regulators still writing those very same carbon limits into brand-new permits for brand-new gas plants — including two projects that will burn Marcellus and Utica gas? 
Back in March, we brought you news that the Trump administration had announced “South Mon,” a $17 billion, 4.3-gigawatt (GW) natural gas-fired power hub headed for southwestern Pennsylvania, funded as part of Japan’s $550 billion U.S. investment commitment (see 
Venture Global (VG), the Arlington, Virginia-based LNG exporter that operates the Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines liquefaction plants in Louisiana — and is building a third, CP2 — reported second quarter 2026 results Tuesday that were, by any measure, a blowout. Revenue hit $4.6 billion (up 48% from 2Q25), net income came in at $1.3 billion (up 266%), and consolidated adjusted EBITDA reached $2.5 billion (up 79%), the largest quarterly EBITDA in company history. VG shipped 127 cargoes in the quarter and raised its full-year EBITDA guidance to $8.7-$9.1 billion, up from the $8.2-$8.5 billion it guided to in May. The company also passed its 1,000th cargo overall and jacked up its quarterly dividend by 122%. Why do we care in Appalachia? Because Plaquemines is fed by pipelines that carry Marcellus/Utica molecules south — and VG is planning to nearly double in size. 
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its August Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) on Tuesday — the agency’s monthly toss at the energy dartboard. Last month EIA nudged its Henry Hub natural gas price forecast up a few pennies. This month it took a real bite out of it. EIA now expects Henry Hub to average $3.44/MMBtu in 2026 (down from $3.67 last month) and $3.31/MMBtu in 2027 (down from $3.49). For the current quarter, the number is $2.87/MMBtu — a full 50 cents below what the agency predicted a month ago. The short version for landowners and royalty owners: gas is going to be cheap this fall. The longer version is more interesting, and it’s a story about where the gas is coming from. 
A new report from RBN Energy fills in a piece of the Project Beacon puzzle we haven’t fully covered: two separate Millennium Pipeline expansions — one already sanctioned, one still on the drawing board — that DT Midstream and TC Energy are advancing to feed New England’s growing appetite for Marcellus/Utica gas. One is moving fast. The other needs New York State’s blessing, which is never a sure thing. 
Forward natural gas prices for this coming winter at the Cove Point LNG terminal in Maryland have gone parabolic — and if you produce, gather, or transport Marcellus/Utica gas, you should care, because the pipes behind this story are the same pipes you use every day. A quick primer: a ‘forward price’ is what buyers and sellers agree today to pay for gas delivered on a future date — think of it as locking in a price months ahead of time. When forward prices spike, it means the market is already betting on tight supply or high demand down the road. 
A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court has ordered the tiny Pickaway County village of Ashville to let voters decide the fate of a data center and natural gas power plant — a project the village council tried to fast-track by declaring it an “emergency” not subject to a public vote. The court didn’t buy it. But before opponents celebrate too hard, the ruling doesn’t guarantee a vote will actually happen this November — county election officials still get to decide whether the deal is even the kind of thing voters can weigh in on at all. 
PJM Interconnection and Dominion Energy are reviewing a July 22 event in Northern Virginia in which roughly 3,800 megawatts (MW) of data center load — the largest such disconnection in PJM’s history — unexpectedly ripped itself off the grid after a routine, correctly cleared transmission fault, forcing PJM operators to scramble to keep the grid stable. The event has reignited a fight over whether data centers, which are growing explosively across the PJM footprint (including Marcellus/Utica territory), need to be held to new “ride through” standards so they stop treating minor grid hiccups like five-alarm fires. 
Pennsylvania got off easy in the 2026-27 budget. Only one data center bill made it into law, and it was a toothless one. But the Pittsburgh Business Times reports Harrisburg is loading up for another round this fall — and this time the antis have a working blueprint to copy. It’s called New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul banned new hyperscale data centers last month, and where the anti-fracking crowd has already spent a decade proving what happens when a state tells industry to go away. 
Remember when Dan Rice IV (older brother of EQT CEO Toby Rice) sold his landfill-gas company Archaea Energy to BP for $4.1 billion back in 2022, pocketing the Rice family somewhere between $720 million and $975 million in the process? Well, what goes around comes around: BP told investors this week it’s now looking to sell Archaea. On the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, new BP CEO Meg O’Neill said Archaea has turned out to be a “capital-intense” way to play the biogas market, and BP would rather go “capital-light” going forward. Translation: RNG isn’t the money-printer BP thought it would be four years ago, and Big Oil’s would-be savior molecule is getting shopped to the highest bidder. 
Babcock & Wilcox — the 159-year-old boiler maker headquartered in Akron, Ohio — announced yesterday that it signed an agreement with Siemens Energy to start work on 20 steam turbine generator sets totaling 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity for gas-fired data center projects. Here’s the part that caught our eye: B&W hasn’t announced signed customers for all of them. The company is buying the factory slots first and lining up buyers second. That’s a real bet on gas-fired power demand — and it’s being made by a company sitting right on top of the Utica. 
A Nasdaq-listed company you’ve almost certainly never heard of says it has signed a binding term sheet to buy roughly 1,800 acres of unleased Marcellus mineral rights in “northern Pennsylvania,” drill a dozen wells on it, burn the gas in on-site turbines, and run a 200-megawatt AI data center behind the meter — with a stretch goal of 1 gigawatt. The company, Alpha Compute Corp. (Nasdaq: ALP), never says which county. We think we’ve figured it out: Tioga County. Here’s what’s actually known, what we deduced, and what nobody should be printing as fact yet. 