HOMER CITY, Pennsylvania — Eleven days after the massive smokestacks and cooling towers of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant came down in a dramatic fashion in this Indiana County village, causing both emotional and economic distress and a sense of hopelessness, Homer City Redevelopment announced that an even bigger natural gas power center would be built in its place.

The Homer City Energy Campus will be a series of natural gas plants that will power a massive data center campus.

The emotion coming from hometown boy Shawn Steffee was palpable — not just because the build will resurrect Homer City, which has seen six generations of Steffees, but also because it will create thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs for at least the next four to six years.

“It is a game changer for the region and for the state of Pennsylvania,” said Steffee, the business agent for the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local 154, in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

Steffee said part of what makes this a big deal is that HCR is building up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation. Homer City will now be the largest electricity producer in the state, and Steffee’s members in Western Pennsylvania will be instrumental in building and maintaining the facility.

Opportunity, Steffee said, has not been available to his members for four years, forcing them to leave their families and communities behind to travel to New Mexico, Washington, Ohio, West Virginia and Tennessee because nothing new was being built in Pennsylvania.

“What this means for us is, I can bring the boilermakers home back to Pennsylvania. This will be anywhere from a four-to-six-year job. They will need hundreds of boilermakers and thousands of construction workers. This is good for everybody in the building trades,” Steffee said.

“This is a mega, mega project. Everybody’s going to benefit, and I am in the process of recruiting new apprentices … not only for this job but what’s coming in the future in my other counties throughout West Virginia, Ohio and here in other places in Pennsylvania,” he continued.

“All we want to do is build new energy infrastructure. We want to be a part of the new industrial revolution of reliable base-load electricity. Whether it’s gas, coal, nuclear, we want to be a part of it,” Steffee explained.

“I dunno a damn thing about artificial intelligence, but I sure as hell know how to build power plants,” he added.

The former coal-fired generating station will immediately begin converting into a 3,200-acre natural gas-powered data center campus, which will begin producing power by 2027.

The project is facilitated by a $10 billion investment from Knighthead Capital Management. HCR made the announcement in Indiana County. Kiewit Power Constructors Company is set to construct the new facility. GE Vernova will be a big partner, providing seven turbines to produce nearly 4.5 GW of power.

“This is great for my hometown (and) my school district that my family has gone to for six generations of kids. My family still lives there. I still live here in the community, and this is definitely a shot in the arm for a county that’s been really economically challenged,” Steffee said.

“I do think that there’s going to be a lot of ripple effect jobs produced. The data centers and the construction jobs will be unreal. And hopefully this helps with the load on the grid too. That’s a lot of megawatts,” he added.

Steffee, who said he didn’t want to get too political, said the emphasis from one campaign on bringing manufacturing back meaningfully in Pennsylvania — as well as a push for American dominance in energy production — sent a message to investors and businesses: It was a good time for shovel-ready jobs.

When visiting Indiana County in September, then-candidate Donald Trump vowed to a packed rally that if elected to a second term in the White House, he would unleash Pennsylvania’s energy sector. He pledged to get workers in the key swing state “pumping, fracking, drilling and producing like never before.”

Flanked by energy workers in hard hats at the event, Trump said of untapped natural gas reserves, “We have all of this stuff, more than anybody. We don’t use it.”

Steffee agreed that there are political ramifications.

“It’s game on for America first, and we want to be the ones leading the world in data centers, artificial intelligence, and we want the manufacturing,” he said.

The AI data centers need a lot of one thing — power. Pennsylvania is known for producing reliable base-load electricity. If AI is this country’s second Industrial Revolution, Pennsylvania is poised to power this one too.

“The state of Pennsylvania is the largest exporter of electricity in the country as of right now, and we’re sitting on the second-largest natural gas deposit in North America. We’ve got all these great producers, and they’re ready to produce gas,” Steffee said.

“Everybody in the building trades in construction and the gas industry in Pennsylvania; we all take pride in our jobs. We’ve just been really taking a hammer here for the last four years,” he said.

Less than a year after his inauguration, former President Joe Biden issued an executive order phasing out the purchase of gasoline-powered vehicles and requiring that the federal government’s buildings be powered by wind, solar or other clean energy.

According to The New York Times, in December 2021, that order directed the government to transform its 300,000 buildings and 600,000 cars and trucks and use its annual purchases of $650 billion in goods and services to meet its goal.

The result of that order and the language he and former Vice President Kamala Harris both used around clean energy research and development hurt union and trade workers in the fossil fuels industries.

Once completed in 2027, it will be the largest natural gas power plant in the United States, surpassing NextEra Energy’s main utility, Florida Power & Light’s West County Energy Center, which has a capacity of nearly 3.8 GW, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Steffee and others involved in the announcement said the project will create over 10,000 direct on-site construction-related jobs, a big boost for the trades, and over 1,000 permanent high-paying operations jobs in the technology sciences. These will include jobs in geology, chemistry, engineering and energy infrastructure.

Kiewit Executive Vice President Dave Flickinger was pleased with how quickly all the stakeholders came together to make the project immediately shovel-ready.

This rebirth has the entire community abuzz with hope for a better future. It’s hard to find anyone in Indiana County and the surrounding regions unhappy about the development, said Republican Pennsylvania state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, whose district includes the Homer City site.

“This is going to completely change the dynamic of the economy, not just in Indiana County but really the entire region,” said Pittman. “Not only from a capital investment perspective, which ultimately leads to growing the tax base, but also the infusion of construction jobs,” he said.

Pittman said that while some characterize those construction jobs as temporary, “The reality is, whenever you’re able to employ skilled labor for multiple years, that essentially allows that workforce to be trained and ready for the next project. So that is significant.”

Pittman said the projection of a thousand permanent good-paying jobs truly is a game changer.

“In a county of our size, it will absolutely revolutionize our economy,” he said.

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