When the Homer City power plant—the largest coal-fired facility in Pennsylvania—shuttered in 2023, it marked the end of a dirty era for the coal plants that dominated America’s electric grid for over half a century. Now, in a whirlwind turnaround, many of them are being revived to fuel the AI era.
Earlier this year, developers announced they would take the coal plant’s corpse—and its invaluable grid interconnections—and resurrect it into the Homer City Energy Campus, a sprawling AI data center complex powered by the largest natural gas-fired power plant in the country, opening on a fast-tracked timeline in 2027.
With U.S. electricity demand projected to surge by as much as 60% through 2050 to fuel the AI boom—initiating a race against time to build sufficient power generation—the strong