History of coal power
From the largest turbine in the world in 1929 to data centers rising on old coal ground, fifteen places where coal built the grid and where it is now letting go. A story in 15 stops on the Wattlas map of the North American grid.
Act I · 1929–1960
State Line (1929)
On April 8, 1929 a turbine generator that General Electric had built in Schenectady went into commercial service on the Lake Michigan shore at Hammond, Indiana, right on the Illinois line, and no power plant anywhere had a larger one. State Line's Unit 1 was rated at 208,000 kW, 30 percent bigger than any other unit in the world, and by itself it held 14 percent of the generating capacity of the Chicago district. Samuel Insull's Commonwealth Edison had housed it in an Art Deco hall by the architects Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, with room for more turbines and a goal of more than 1,000 MW, which would have made State Line the first gigawatt plant on earth. Like Edison's Pearl Street station before it, the plant burned coal, and Insull's creed of ever larger machines kept busy around the clock rested on a fuel that seemed as plentiful as the demand. Six months after Unit 1 started, the crash began, and within a few years Insull's heavily leveraged empire had fallen apart. The plant carried on. Unit 1 stayed the largest in the world until December 1953, when Ohio Power's 213,000 kW unit on the Muskingum River passed it, and Commonwealth Edison added units at State Line in 1938, 1955 and 1963. From the 1950s into the 2000s, coal would fire about half of all the electricity made in the United States.
On the map: The dot marks State Line Generating Plant on the Lake Michigan shore at Hammond, Indiana, dated 1929. The map lists no power plant within 3 km of it now. State Line Substation, 345 kV, is 560 m to the southeast, and the nearest plant, Calumet Energy Team, burns gas about 4 km to the southwest.
Sources: ASME Landmark 24, State Line Generating Unit 1, Wikipedia: State Line Generating Plant, Wikipedia: Pearl Street Station, EIA, Annual Energy Review Table 8.2a
Shawnee and the atomic load (1951–1956)
Few machines have ever been as hungry for electricity as a gaseous diffusion plant, which enriches uranium by pumping it as a gas through barrier after barrier. When the Atomic Energy Commission chose a former ordnance works near Paducah, Kentucky for one in 1950, it needed power on a scale no dam on the Tennessee River could supply, and at its peak the Paducah plant drew 3,040 MW. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created to tame a river, answered with coal. Construction of Shawnee began on the Ohio River in January 1951, the first unit went into service on April 9, 1953, and by October 1956 all ten of its 175 MW units were running, making it the second largest coal plant in the nation after TVA's own Kingston. In 1955 coal passed hydroelectricity as TVA's largest source of power, and over the decade the agency's generating capacity nearly quadrupled. Upriver, a group of investor-owned utilities formed the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation in 1952 to power the government's newest enrichment plant, at Piketon, Ohio, and its two coal plants, Kyger Creek in Ohio and Clifty Creek in Indiana, began running in 1955. Across the country, coal plants made 154.5 billion kWh in 1950 and 403.1 billion in 1960. Shawnee fed the Paducah works for sixty years, until enrichment there stopped on May 31, 2013, and nine of its units still burn coal.
On the map: Shawnee, on the Ohio River below Paducah, is 1,206 MW of coal on the map with 1953 as its year. It is one of four coal plants the map lists as operating for TVA, about 6.4 GW with Cumberland, Gallatin and Kingston.
Sources: Wikipedia: Shawnee Fossil Plant, Wikipedia: Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Wikipedia: Tennessee Valley Authority, Wikipedia: Ohio Valley Electric Corporation, EIA, Annual Energy Review Table 8.2a
Philo 6 and supercritical steam (1957–1960)
By the 1950s the engineers of American Gas and Electric, the company that became AEP, knew where the next cheap kilowatt-hour was hiding. It lay in hotter steam at higher pressure, and they decided to go past a line no power plant had crossed, the critical point, where water and steam stop being separate things at all. At Philo, on the Muskingum River in Ohio, where the company's Unit 1 had been the first in the country to reheat its steam back in 1924, they ordered a 125 MW unit with a throttle pressure of 4,500 psi, almost double anything used for power before. Babcock & Wilcox built the boiler and labeled it UP 1, the first of its Universal Pressure line, and General Electric built the turbine-generator. Unit 6 sent its first power to customers on May 20, 1957 and entered commercial service on August 1. It turned fuel into electricity at efficiencies approaching 40 percent, when the national average was 29.9 percent. Three years later Philadelphia Electric went further still at Eddystone, on the Delaware, with steam at 5,000 psi and 1,200°F, so far beyond known conditions that its engineers had to extend the steam tables just to size the equipment. Eddystone 1 was the most efficient unit in the nation, and it taught the industry that slightly milder steam made a more economical plant, which is how supercritical units have been built ever since. The Philo plant is gone. Its ASME plaque stands at AEP headquarters in Columbus, near a sculpture made from the rotors of Unit 6's turbine.
On the map: The dot marks Philo Unit 6 on the Muskingum River in Ohio, dated 1957. The plant is gone, and the map lists no power plant within 25 km of where it stood.
Sources: ASME Landmark 228, Philo 6, Wikipedia: Philo Power Plant, ASME Landmark 226, Eddystone Unit 1
Act II · 1969–1991
Navajo (1970–1976)
The Central Arizona Project was meant to carry Colorado River water uphill across the desert to the cities and farms of central and southern Arizona, and lifting it would take a great deal of power. The Bureau of Reclamation's obvious source was two more hydro dams on the Colorado, at Bridge Canyon and Marble Canyon, but both sat close to the Grand Canyon, and a coalition of environmental groups pushed for a thermal plant instead. The answer was the Navajo Project. It paired a coal plant on 1,786 acres leased from the Navajo Nation near Page with the Kayenta Mine on Black Mesa, a railroad built to join them, and 800 miles of 500 kV lines. Four Corners, to the east, had already shown how the Southwest's coal could be burned where it lay and its power sent to distant cities, and Navajo carried the idea further. Bechtel began construction in April 1970, and the three units came online in 1974, 1975 and 1976, 2,250 MW in all, with Reclamation owning 24.3 percent to pump about 1.5 million acre-feet of water a year. Scrubbers followed in the late 1990s to clear the winter haze over the Grand Canyon. When shale gas pushed power prices below the plant's costs, its owners voted in 2017 to close it, and on November 18, 2019 it stopped generating, and the Kayenta Mine closed with it. The three 775 foot stacks came down on December 18, 2020. The switchyard and its 500 kV lines were left in place, still part of the grid of the Southwest.
On the map: The dot marks Navajo Generating Station near Page, Arizona, dated 1974. The plant is gone, but NAVAJO, a 500 kV substation, stands 390 m from the dot, and three 500 kV lines still leave it. Glen Canyon Dam, 1,312 MW, is 9 km to the west-northwest. The map lists no coal mine within 200 km.
Sources: Wikipedia: Navajo Generating Station, Global Energy Monitor: Navajo Generating Station
Colstrip (1975–1986)
Colstrip began in 1924 as a Northern Pacific Railway company town on the plains of southeastern Montana, where the railroad stripped coal from the thick Rosebud seam to fire its steam locomotives, and during the Second World War the mine was guarded against sabotage and its miners were not allowed to quit. In 1959 the Montana Power Company bought the mine rights and the town, planning to burn the coal where it lay and ship electricity instead of fuel. The Rosebud Mine opened in 1968, and through the 1970s and 1980s Colstrip swelled into a boomtown as the plant rose beside it. Units 1 and 2, 358 MW each, entered service in 1975 and 1976, and units 3 and 4, 778 MW each, in 1984 and 1986, cooled with water piped 30 miles from the Yellowstone River. Utilities across the Pacific Northwest took shares, Puget Sound Energy, Portland General Electric, Avista and PacifiCorp among them, and new 500 kV lines carried the power west across the Continental Divide to their customers. For a generation the lights of Seattle and Portland ran partly on Montana coal. By 2019 the plant was the sixth largest source of greenhouse gases in the country, and units 1 and 2 stopped in early January 2020. A Washington state ban on coal power then pushed Avista and Puget Sound Energy to leave, and on January 1, 2026 NorthWestern Energy took over their shares of units 3 and 4 for nothing, raising its own stake to 55 percent. The two big units run on, fed by the Rosebud Mine next door.
On the map: Colstrip is 1,480 MW of coal on the map, the largest plant of any kind it lists in Montana. The Rosebud Mine, 2 km to the west-southwest, dug 5.5 million short tons in the four quarters to June 2026, and two 500 kV lines, 181 and 187 km long, run from the COLSTRIP substation to BROADVIEW.
Sources: Wikipedia: Colstrip, Montana, Global Energy Monitor: Colstrip Steam Plant, NorthWestern Energy, Form 10-Q for the quarter to March 31, 2026
The Powder River Basin (1977–1984)
Under the grass and sagebrush of northeastern Wyoming lies coal in seams so thick that one, at North Antelope Rochelle, runs 80 feet from top to bottom, and it is some of the cleanest coal in the country, about 0.2 percent sulfur. For most of the century it lay too far from the big markets to matter. The Clean Air Act of 1970 changed that, because utilities in the East and Midwest now had to cut what came out of their stacks, and attention turned to the basin's vast reserves of low-sulfur coal. The first large strip mine of the new era, Belle Ayr, was built south of Gillette in 1970 and shipped its first coal in 1972, and ARCO opened Black Thunder in 1977. Congress added its own push in 1978 with the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act, which restricted new power plants burning oil or natural gas. What the basin still needed was a cheap way out. On October 14, 1980 President Carter signed the Staggers Rail Act, which let railroads and shippers make contracts with little federal review, and on August 16, 1984 the first commercial train ran on the Joint Line, the Burlington Northern coal road that the Chicago and North Western had bought into. Unit trains of up to 150 hopper cars began shuttling Wyoming coal to power plants across the country, as far as the Gulf Coast of Texas. By 2005 the Joint Line was carrying a record 325 million tons a year, and in early 2016 between 80 and 100 coal trains a day were leaving the basin. By 2019 the count had fallen to about 50.
On the map: Each dot is a coal mine. The 12 in view, all in Wyoming, dug 202.6 million short tons in the four quarters to June 2026, 39% of the 524.7 million from all 467 coal mines on the map, and North Antelope Rochelle, at 64.1 million, dug the most of any. Wyodak, 332 MW, and Dry Fork Station, 390 MW, burn coal among them.
Sources: WyoHistory.org, Wyoming's First Coal Bust, Wikipedia: Orin Subdivision (the Joint Line), Wikipedia: North Antelope Rochelle Mine, Wikipedia: Black Thunder Coal Mine, Wikipedia: Staggers Rail Act, EIA, Repeal of the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act, Grist, Powder River Basin coal on the move
Acid rain (1980–1991)
By 1976, when researchers finished cataloging the acidified lakes of New York's Adirondack Park, half of the lakes more than 2,000 feet above sea level had no fish in them at all. The damage had been sent from far away. Sulfur dioxide from coal plants rose from their stacks, mixed with water in the clouds and came down hundreds of miles downwind as acid, on the lakes and spruce forests of the Adirondacks, New England and eastern Canada. Many plants had built taller stacks to meet local air standards, which cleared the air around them and sent the pollution farther. Through the 1980s acid rain became the sorest point between Ottawa and Washington. The plants of the Ohio Valley, the densest coal fleet on the continent, were at the center of the argument, and the utilities that ran them and the miners of the high-sulfur coal fields that fed them feared what a cure would cost. The fight in Congress took most of the decade. On November 15, 1990 President George H. W. Bush signed amendments to the Clean Air Act whose Title IV set out to bring the power sector's sulfur dioxide down to about half of its 1980 level, and on March 13, 1991 he and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed the Canada-United States Air Quality Agreement, known in Canada as the Acid Rain Treaty.
On the map: Every dot is a coal plant. Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Pennsylvania hold 48 that the map lists as operating, about 46 GW, more than a quarter of all the coal capacity it lists as operating. The largest draw first, the rest as you zoom in.
Sources: Adirondack Explorer, Acid rain in the Adirondacks, Wikipedia: Acid rain, EPA, Acid Rain Program, Congressional Research Service RL34235, Wikipedia: U.S.–Canada Air Quality Agreement
Act III · 1993–2012
Gavin, Cheshire and the first cap and trade (1993–2002)
The law Congress passed in 1990 tried something no environmental law had tried before. It set a national cap on sulfur dioxide from power plants, gave each plant allowances to emit a share of it, and let their owners buy and sell them, so that the plants that could cut pollution most cheaply would cut the most. The first auction of allowances, run for the EPA by the Chicago Board of Trade in March 1993, sold 150,010 of them, at clearing prices of $131 and $122 a ton. Phase I began in 1995 with 263 units at 110 mostly coal-burning plants in 21 eastern and midwestern states, the first national cap and trade program in the country. Each owner chose its own way to comply, some with low-sulfur coal hauled from Wyoming and others with scrubbers that washed the sulfur out of the flue gas. On the Ohio River at Cheshire, Ohio, AEP's Gavin plant ran two units of 1,300 MW, placed in service in 1974 and 1975, burning some 20,000 tons of coal a day and tied to the grid by 765 kV lines. In 2000 the EPA cited Gavin for contributing to acid rain, and AEP added new pollution controls. They brought what AEP called a totally unexpected increase in sulfur trioxide, which mixed with water vapor into a sulfuric acid mist, and on humid days a blue haze settled over the village of 221 people. Residents called them touchdowns. In 2002 AEP settled for about $20 million, paying homeowners far more than their houses were worth to leave, and within six months nearly the whole town was gone. Across the country the market did its work, and by 2023 the plants in the program had cut their sulfur dioxide by 96 percent from 1990.
On the map: The dot marks the Cheshire, Ohio buyout, dated 2002. Gavin, 2,722 MW, the largest coal plant the map lists in Ohio, is 2 km to the south, with GAVIN, a 765 kV substation, beside it. Kyger Creek, 963 MW from 1955, is 4 km to the south-southwest.
Sources: EPA, Acid Rain Program, EPA, 1993 SO2 Allowance Auction, EPA, Power Sector Programs progress report, Wikipedia: Gavin Power Plant, The Guardian, September 11, 2024, Congressional Research Service RL34235
Prairie State and the peak (2007–2012)
In 2007 the coal plants of the United States made 2,016 billion kWh, more electricity than they had ever made before or have made since. Coal's share of the country's power had already crested. By EIA's count it stood near 57 percent in 1988 and was 48.5 percent in 2007, as gas and nuclear plants took more of a load that kept on growing. Yet the coal industry was building again, and one of its last giants rose in the farm country of southern Illinois. Prairie State was planned to sit on top of its own fuel, with the Lively Grove Mine dug beside it to deliver about 6 million tons a year of high-sulfur Illinois coal. Nine public power agencies and cooperatives from Ohio to Missouri bought into it. The price grew from an early estimate of $2 billion to about $4.4 billion by 2010, and the Chicago Tribune called it the largest source of carbon dioxide built in the United States in a quarter century. The first 800 MW unit went online in June 2012 and the second that November. Prairie State, Virginia City and the John W. Turk Jr. plant in Arkansas, all finished in 2012, were among the last large coal plants built in the United States. Most of the fleet around them was far older, and EIA counts 88 percent of American coal capacity as built between 1950 and 1990.
On the map: Prairie State is 1,630 MW of coal on the map with 2012 as its year, and no coal plant the map lists as operating has a later one. Virginia City in Virginia and John W. Turk Jr. in Arkansas share it. Lively Grove Mine, 1 km to the east-northeast, dug 6.3 million short tons in the four quarters to June 2026.
Sources: EIA, Annual Energy Review Table 8.2a, EIA, Today in Energy, 2021, Wikipedia: Prairie State Energy Campus, EIA, Today in Energy, 2017
Kingston (2008)
Sometime between midnight and 1 am on December 22, 2008, in the cold dark beside TVA's Kingston plant in East Tennessee, the earthen dike at one corner of an ash pond gave way. Since the 1950s the plant, built to power the atomic works at Oak Ridge, had pumped its fly ash as a wet slurry into ponds on the Emory River shore, and now 1.1 billion gallons of it poured out in a wave that lasted about a minute, followed by smaller surges. The gray sludge spread over as much as 300 acres, up to 6 feet deep. It covered 12 homes, ruptured a gas line and blocked the rail line that brought the plant its coal, and fish were thrown onto the riverbanks. No one died that night. The cleanup cost TVA more than $1 billion and ran until 2015, and more than 30 of the workers who did it died within ten years. In 2018 a jury found that the contractor that employed them had failed to protect them. The spill pushed the EPA to write national rules for coal ash, published in 2015. By then a second disaster had followed. On February 2, 2014 a drainage pipe burst at an ash pond beside Duke Energy's retired Dan River plant in North Carolina, and its ash settled along the river as far as 70 miles downstream. Duke pleaded guilty to nine Clean Water Act charges and paid $102 million in fines and restitution, and the state legislature ordered it to close all 32 of its ash ponds in North Carolina by 2029.
On the map: The dot marks the Kingston fly ash spill, dated 2008, at the ash ponds beside the Emory River. TVA's Kingston coal plant, 1,147 MW from 1954, is 2 km to the south-southwest, and the map lists a 1,390 MW gas plant planned at the same point for 2027.
Sources: EPA On-Scene Coordinator, TVA Kingston Flyash Release, Wikipedia: Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill, Wikipedia: 2014 Dan River coal ash spill, CBS News and AP, 2015
Act IV · 2013–present
Nanticoke and Ontario's exit (2013–2014)
A quarter of Ontario's electricity came from coal in 2003, some 7,560 MW, and the biggest share of it from a single station on the north shore of Lake Erie. Ontario Hydro had chosen Nanticoke in 1967 for its harbor and its reach to American coal, and from 1972 its eight units came on in phases through 1978 until it was the largest coal plant in North America. Ships unloaded coal onto a stockpile that could hold 4.5 million metric tons, and by 1981 the station burned 35,000 metric tons a day and supplied as much as 15 percent of the province's electricity. In 2001 it was also the largest single source of greenhouse gases in Canada. In 2003 the province committed to end coal power entirely. Lakeview, on the Lake Ontario shore at Mississauga, shut in 2005, Atikokan in 2012, and Lambton and Nanticoke's last four units in 2013. Thunder Bay followed in 2014, and Ontario became the first government in North America to take coal out of its electricity system. The Ending Coal for Cleaner Air Act of 2015 made sure it would not come back. About 1,500 MW more from nuclear, 5,500 MW of new gas plants and 5,500 MW of wind, solar and bioenergy filled the gap, and Atikokan and Thunder Bay reopened to burn biomass. Nanticoke's two stacks were imploded on February 28, 2018, and a solar farm has generated on the grounds since 2019. Alberta followed a decade later. In June 2024 its last coal plant, Genesee, finished converting to natural gas, five years ahead of the provincial mandate.
On the map: The dot marks Nanticoke Generating Station on Lake Erie, dated 1972. Nanticoke Solar Farm, 44 MW, is 1.5 km to the northeast, and Oneida Energy Storage, 250 MW, 3 km to the north-northwest. The map lists no coal plant anywhere in Ontario.
Sources: Government of Ontario, The End of Coal, Wikipedia: Nanticoke Generating Station, Power Engineering, Alberta's last coal plant powers down, Wikipedia: Genesee Generating Station
Carbon capture (2014–2020)
If coal was going to last in a world worried about the climate, someone had to show that its carbon dioxide could be caught before it left the stack. In its owner's words, the first power station in the world to do it successfully was a lignite unit on the Saskatchewan prairie. SaskPower rebuilt Unit 3 of its Boundary Dam station near Estevan with an amine plant that stripped carbon dioxide from the flue gas, sold most of it to push more oil out of the Weyburn field, and opened it in October 2014. Its early years were hard, with the capture plant running about 40 percent of the time in 2015 and the bill rising to about C$1.5 billion. In Mississippi, Southern Company's Kemper County plant meant to turn local lignite into gas and capture 65 percent of its carbon, but delays and redesigns drove the cost to $7.5 billion, and in June 2017 it gave up on coal and burned natural gas alone. The largest attempt came southwest of Houston, at W. A. Parish, one of the biggest power plants in the country, which burns Powder River Basin coal that arrives by the trainload. NRG and JX Nippon built Petra Nova there with up to $190 million from the Department of Energy, and when it was completed on January 10, 2017 it was the largest post-combustion capture system in the world. It was designed to catch about 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from a 240 MW slipstream, some 1.4 million metric tons a year, and send it some 80 miles by pipe to the West Ranch oil field, where production rose from 300 barrels a day to 15,000. The project had been planned with oil near $100 a barrel and opened with oil near $50. On May 1, 2020, with prices crushed by the pandemic, NRG shut it down. JX Nippon started it again on September 5, 2023.
On the map: The dot marks the Petra Nova carbon capture plant, dated 2017, at W. A. Parish southwest of Houston. W A Parish, 3,632 MW, the largest coal plant on the map, is 930 m to the north-northeast, and Petra Nova Carbon Capture Cogen, 41 MW of gas, 160 m to the east.
Sources: SaskPower, Boundary Dam Carbon Capture Project, Wikipedia: Boundary Dam Power Station, Wikipedia: Kemper Project, MIT CCS Technologies, Kemper County IGCC, U.S. DOE, Petra Nova W.A. Parish project, Wikipedia: Petra Nova
Paradise (2020)
John Prine grew up in Maywood, outside Chicago, but his parents came from Muhlenberg County in the western Kentucky coalfield, and in summers the family went back to visit relatives near Paradise, a little town on the Green River. By the time he wrote a song about it, Paradise was gone. Peabody's strip mines had torn up the country around it, and the Tennessee Valley Authority had built a coal plant beside it, two units of 741 MW that started in 1963 and a third of 1,150 MW in 1970, the only plant in TVA's coal fleet with cooling towers. In 1967 TVA razed what was left of the town. Prine's song, released on his first album in 1971, had a son asking his father to take him back to Muhlenberg County and hearing that Mr. Peabody's coal train had hauled it away, and it became a bluegrass standard that made the place famous far beyond Kentucky. Half a century later it was the plant's turn. Between January 2015 and April 2016, as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards took effect, about 87 GW of coal plants installed new pollution controls and nearly 20 GW retired, and in 2016 natural gas passed coal as the country's leading source of electricity. TVA replaced Paradise's two older units with a gas combined cycle plant in 2017. In February 2019 the TVA board voted 5 to 2 to close the third despite lobbying from the Trump administration and Kentucky's governor to keep it, and on February 1, 2020 the last coal unit at Paradise shut down, at the time the largest coal retirement in the country. The three cooling towers came down on November 10, 2022.
On the map: The dot marks Paradise Fossil Plant on the Green River in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, dated 1963. The map lists a TVA gas plant named Paradise 1.4 km to the north-northwest, 1,763 MW from 2017, and no coal mine within 50 km.
Sources: Wikipedia: John Prine, Wikipedia: Paradise Combined Cycle Plant, Louisville Public Media, November 10, 2022, EIA, Today in Energy 25272, EIA, Today in Energy 26972, EIA, Today in Energy 31672
Sherco (2023–2030)
Three trainloads of coal a day, some 30,000 tons, fed the Sherburne County Generating Station on the Mississippi at Becker, Minnesota, Xcel Energy's largest fossil plant, and for decades Sherco paid 77 percent of the city's annual tax revenue. Its three units came online in 1976, 1977 and 1987. Xcel decided to close it in stages. Unit 2 retired at the end of 2023, and unit 1 is planned to follow in 2026 and unit 3 in 2030. What happened next, on the same ground and the same wires, made Sherco a model. By the 2020s the hardest thing to find for a new power plant was often a place to plug it in, as projects waited years in interconnection queues for their studies and upgrades. A retiring coal plant already had one, a high-voltage switchyard with 345 kV lines fanning out toward the Twin Cities. Xcel built Sherco Solar across the fields around the plant, 710 MW reusing the coal plant's grid connections, and the first 220 MW began sending power in November 2024. That month it also broke ground on a pilot of a new kind of battery, a 10 MW iron-air system from Form Energy that can run for 100 hours, and a 600 MW battery is under construction beside the plant. For a few years the last coal units and their replacements share the same switchyard, and when unit 3 shuts down in 2030 the connection that carried coal power to the Twin Cities for half a century will carry sunlight instead.
On the map: Sherburne County is 1,556 MW of coal on the map. Sherco Solar I, II and III, spread over the fields around it, come to 710 MW, and beside the plant the map lists a 600 MW battery under construction for 2027 and a 10 MW long-duration battery planned for 2028.
Sources: Xcel Energy, November 19, 2024, RMI, The Sherco clean repowering, Global Energy Monitor: Sherburne County Plant
Homer City and the new demand (now)
On the morning of March 22, 2025 explosives brought down the chimney at Homer City, in the hills of western Pennsylvania, along with the plant's cooling towers. At 1,217 feet it had been the tallest chimney in the United States, built in 1977 for the plant's third unit, and it became the tallest freestanding structure ever deliberately demolished. The coal plant beneath it had run since 1969 and shut for good in 2023. A few weeks after the blast the site's owners announced what would take its place, a 4.5 GW gas plant built around seven GE Vernova turbines and a campus of data centers for artificial intelligence, more than $10 billion of it, using the high-voltage lines that had carried the coal plant's power into PJM and New York. After two decades of nearly flat demand, the grid was being asked to grow quickly again, and Washington reached for the old coal fleet. On May 23, 2025, eight days before Consumers Energy was to retire its J.H. Campbell plant on the Michigan shore of Lake Michigan, the Secretary of Energy ordered it kept running under the emergency powers of the Federal Power Act. The order was renewed every ninety days, at a cost Consumers put at $259 million, and by the summer of 2026 similar orders held coal units open in Colorado, Indiana and Washington. On September 11, 2026 a federal appeals court ruled that the first Campbell order had gone beyond what the law allows. At the southern tip of the same lake, on the ground at Hammond where Insull's great turbine began turning in 1929, a data center has stood since 2020.
On the map: Homer City Generating Station is on the map as a planned gas plant, 4,396 MW for 2028. Homer City Energy Campus, the data center it is meant to power, is 110 m away, and HOMER CITY, a 345 kV substation, 540 m. Keystone and Conemaugh, 1,711 MW of coal each, are about 20 km away.
Sources: Wikipedia: Homer City Generating Station, Data Center Frontier, Homer City Energy Campus, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, September 17, 2026, U.S. DOE, 2026 202(c) orders, Baxtel, Digital Crossroad