How the AI data center boom is breathing new life into dirty, old coal plants

With the shuttered Homer City coal plant in the background, at the Lucerne Reclamation project site in Pennsylvania, a worker moves coal refuse to be prepared for transport to be cleaned on June 12, 2024. The soil, contaminated by coal refuse, is cleaned and returned to the land where it is encased and covered with top soil and planted as a meadow.

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.