DEP gives preliminary nod to $10B Homer City plant, environmental group sounds alarm

Trib Live - Joe Napsha 9.15.25

State environmental regulators say they intend to approve an air quality plan for a proposed natural gas-fired power plant near Homer City, despite concerns from an environmental group that the facility would become the largest air polluter in Pennsylvania.

The Department of Environmental Protection said the air quality plan submitted by Homer City Generation LP for its $10 billion project meets air quality requirements, though it has proposed adding 53 conditions to ensure the company complies.

The 4.5-gigawatt facility would sit on a 3,200-acre site straddling Blacklick and Center townships and would supply electricity to thousands of homes, according to Homer City Redevelopment. It also would power the needs of artificial intelligence-driven hyperscale data processing centers.

The public can weigh in on the air quality plan from Homer City Redevelopment during an open house beginning at 6 p.m. Wednesday (Sept. 17) at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Kovalchick Convention and Athletics Center. A public hearing is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. DEP will decide whether the plan approval will be issued after the formal comment period ends Sept. 29 and the department reviews the testimony, said Thomas Decker, a spokesman for the agency's Northwest region.

The plant would emit three times the highest level of emissions from any power plant in the state, according to Tom Pike, the Clean Air Council's climate research policy analyst in Pittsburgh. The natural gas-fueled plant could emit more than 17 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, Pike said.

"That's like burning 18 billion pounds of coal or using 39 million barrels of oil. This plant would see greenhouse gas emissions increase substantially - over 300% - because the gas plant would be larger than the former coal plant," Pike said. "Unlike the coal plant, the new gas plant would operate at full capacity 24/7."

Homer City Generation has said it expects greenhouse gases from the seven combined gas- and steam-driven turbines and 10 single-cycle turbines will be reduced by about 60% per megawatt hour compared to the former 2 gigawatt coal-fired power plant.

The prospective operator is projecting that the turbines would operate 24 hours a day, every day, according to a notice in the Pennsylvania Bulletin. It is scheduled to begin producing power in 2027.

A spokesman for Homer City Redevelopment said the company will await a formal response from DEP to comments submitted during the air quality permit process.

According to Pike, the plant could fill the air with as much as 910 tons annually of ammonia, which can combine with other gases to form particulate matter that can lodge in the lungs.

"The developer is asking the residents of Indiana County to endure their air frequently smelling like ammonia to power a machine that takes away jobs," said Pike, referring to data centers providing power for artificial intelligence.

Water needed by the power plant will come from Two Lick Lake, which is owned by Homer City Redevelopment and was used by the former coal-fired Homer City power plant. The man-made reservoir, with a surface area of 500 acres and a water storage capacity of about 5 billion gallons, sits a few miles east of Indiana and across parts of Cherryhill and White townships.

By having its own water source, Homer City Redevelopment will avoid public concerns swirling around other proposed data centers in Pennsylvania that would tap public water supplies. Hyperscale data centers - giant data centers with capabilities to increase their size and designed for large-scale workloads - are expected to draw between 15.8 billion gallons and 32.7 billion gallons of water in the United States by 2028, according to the 2024 U.S. Data Center Energy Usage Report.

The natural gas-fired power plants typically will draw between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water each day, said Quentin Good, a policy analyst with Frontier Group, a partner of PennEnvironmental Research and Policy Center, an environmental group based in Philadelphia. Most of the water drawn for those hyperscale data processing centers is evaporated in the process of keeping the computer servers cool, while a secondary use is in the operation of the power plant, Good said.

When Homer City Redevelopment announced plans in April to build the power plant, Indiana County officials saw the facility as a vehicle that would boost the economy of a county that suffered a blow when the former coal-fired power plant closed in July 2023 after 54 years. An estimated 10,000 construction-related jobs will be created, along with about 1,000 direct and indirect permanent jobs in technology, operations and energy infrastructure, Homer City Redevelopment stated.

Demolition of the former coal-fired plant was halted earlier this summer by a federal judge in Pittsburgh when a legal battle arose between Homer City Redevelopment and Frontier Industrial Corp. of Buffalo over demolition rights. The legal hurdle fell July 1 when Frontier voluntarily dismissed its claim that Homer City Redevelopment had breached its demolition contract when it hired another firm for the job. Frontier retained the right to refile the case.

Despite the court-ordered delay in the demolition, a Homer City Redevelopment spokesman said the project still is on schedule to begin producing power in 2027. The company has not revealed how many data processing centers it may support or the identities of the companies that own them.

Link to article: DEP gives preliminary nod to $10B Homer City plant, environmental group sounds alarm | TribLIVE.com

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