Seven gas turbines planned to juice datacenter demand by 2027:
Developers on Wednesday announced plans to bring up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power online by 2027 at the site of what was once Pennsylvania's largest coal plant, as part of a proposed datacenter campus running AI and high-performance computing workloads.
Development of the 3,200-acre natural gas-powered datacenter campus is being led by Homer City Redevelopment (HCR) and is expected to exceed $10 billion for power infrastructure and site readiness alone, with additional billions anticipated for the datacenter development.
As we understand it, the plant and server campus will be next to each other, as depicted in this video. The power station site will need rebuilding not only to turn it into a gas-fired system but also because it's pretty much demolished, save for electrical infrastructure such as transmission lines that can be reused.
HCR has yet to disclose a tenant for what's hoped to be a massive datacenter complex, with its emphasis for now largely on building out the energy infrastructure and datacenter shell in anticipation of future demand.
The project's backers, including Knighthead Capital Management, appear confident that demand will follow, with the campus designed to deliver up to 4.5 gigawatts of power to run AI and hyperscale workloads.
[...] Until that happens, the site won't exactly be a bright spot on hyperscalers' annual sustainability reports, though HCR claims the gas turbines will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60-65 percent per megawatt-hour compared to the plant's retired coal units.
Kiewit Power Constructors is expected to begin work on the facility later this year with the first generators installed in 2026; the site is expected to start generating power by 2027 — just in time for Nvidia's 600 kilowatt Kyber racks to make their debut.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @03:30AM (1 child)
Fwiw, I had trouble wrapping my head around 4.5 gigawatts, but it converts to about 6 million horsepower. Or in other words, about a tenth of the world's horse population of 60 million, patiently walking on treadmills (or in hamster wheels) that are connected to generators.
I kind of miss the days when 640K was enough for anyone.
(Score: 4, Funny) by jb on Wednesday May 07, @05:02AM
If you're from somewhere where a horse can fit in a hamster wheel, then I sure hope I never meet one of your hamsters!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @04:31AM
for the start of the Trump Depression
(Score: 5, Touché) by ledow on Wednesday May 07, @07:14AM (1 child)
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the future.
Burning fossil fuels in entire power stations dedicated to powering people's interaction with something they consider "more friendly" than asking "what time does the bus leave" and getting the right answer back.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 10, @03:18AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Wednesday May 07, @11:25AM (1 child)
Let's outsource our critical thinking so the elites can get richer while population is reduced to either flesh-robots following their AI instructions in robotic tasks, or consumption.
Idiocracy is not a result of "the poor idiots outbreeding the rich elites", but our own laziness to just not bother to think. I wonder if you get any happiness like that -- definitely no life satisfaction. Maybe that can be replaced by more drug consumption? And where's that exercise pill, that we were all promised?
(Score: 1) by lars_stefan_axelsson on Friday May 09, @08:07AM
Yes. There have been many dystopic novels about the future, but I can't help wondering whether Marshall Brain hit the nail on the head with "Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future" in 2003: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 [marshallbrain.com]
In summary (quoting from the first chapter)
"The “robot” installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called “Manna”, version 1.0*."
[...]
"But the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no different. The problem was the quality of the fast food experience. Some restaurants were run perfectly. They had courteous and thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and high accuracy on the orders. Other restaurants were chaotic and uncomfortable to customers. Since one bad experience could turn a customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed stores were the Achilles heel of any chain.
To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born.
Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down. The software was also attached to the time clock, so it knew who was working in the restaurant. Manna also had “help buttons” throughout the restaurant. Small signs on the buttons told customers to push them if they needed help or saw a problem. There was a button in the restroom that a customer could press if the restroom had a problem. There was a button on each trashcan. There was a button near each cash register, one in the kiddie area and so on. These buttons let customers give Manna a heads up when something went wrong.
At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do. There were orders coming in from the cash registers, so Manna directed employees to prepare those meals. There were also toilets to be scrubbed on a regular basis, floors to mop, tables to wipe, sidewalks to sweep, buns to defrost, inventory to rotate, windows to wash and so on. Manna kept track of the hundreds of tasks that needed to get done, and assigned each task to an employee one at a time."
"Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance."
It gets worse from there...
And starting to sound not implausible, doesn't it...
Stefan Axelsson
(Score: 2) by Username on Wednesday May 07, @02:09PM (2 children)
Did they run out of coal? Or did they perfect turning coal into gas? Did the miners learn to code?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday May 07, @04:50PM
Literally, yeah. Pull a graph of PA coal mining production its the usual logistics curve with a peak around 110 years ago and steady decline since. Its got the usual technological extension on the right side but the slope never went significantly up again.
Anthracite production (the "good" less polluting stuff) is even more brutal. It dropped to civil war numbers by the 1960s and is meandering around zero now.
Most coal is mined in Wyoming now, which would be a long transport. It would be cheaper to build a new plant in WY than to transport all the coal across the country. The "bad" news is production in WY peaked back in 06 and has been in permanent decline since, now its around early 90s production.
For a variety of financial / economic reasons coal plants were always built and designed for base load whereas a gas turbine operation can spin up and down in seconds to minutes so that works well for variable "AI" loads.
I would assume this is the "famous" Homer plant. That was only 2 GW so they're upgrading quite a bit. Used to generate 2 GW by emitting 14 million tons of CO2 per year. Lets make the math painfully ridiculous and call it 14 million tons of coal (ha ha chemistry joke) All of PA only produces about 50 million tons per year. Its not like the old days around Y1.9K then they produced 250 million tons. The Homer plant is kind of ridiculous in the industry because it was racing the EPA vs the mines vs the banks to see which caused it to shut down first. Who gets "credit" is usually a political litmus test type of thing. It was kind of a perfect storm disaster of an electrical plant.
Yes I know the actual ratio is about 12/44th but production is dropping fast, from "around 200" in 1940 to "around 50" in 1960 means being off by a factor of 4 or so only means a time error of about 2 decades, a pretty short amount of time.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday May 07, @05:01PM
Mostly they died. Peak coal mining employment in the USA was just under a million a century ago. Crazy to think about. The ones that haven't died of old age since 1920, majority of them moved out west.
The numbers are intentionally F-d with over the decades, they added all the office workers to "coal mining employment" in the 70s, boosted numbers about 100K. Figure total employment dropped to a third of 1980 numbers by now, office non-miners probably still around 100K 70s number, there's probably only about 20K coal miners in the entire USA right now. Mostly I'd assume out west but as long as they make a profit digging it up there will always be "some" in the east. I would hazard a wild ass yet semi-educated guess there's less than 1K coal miners in PA now. As a data point, there's a mining association in WY claiming there's about 5 thousand coal miners in WY producing 40% of the entire nation's coal.