UNIONTOWN, Pennsylvania — Scott Dunn did not get a call from Washington. Instead, he received calls from his constituents.
The chairman of the Fayette County Board of Commissioners had watched the March announcement like everyone else: a $17 billion natural gas generation hub somewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania, with 4.3 gigawatts of capacity, financed through Japan’s investment commitment under the U.S.-Japan trade agreement, with NextEra Energy Resources as developer.
The federal government called it Project South Mon. It would not say where. Dunn did the arithmetic anyone from Dunbar would do.
“It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out, OK, the Monongahela is only so big and south of Pittsburgh, and that could be us,” he said. “Why couldn’t it be us?”
Then his phone rang.
“I actually started hearing from property owners, and they were like, ‘Hey, we’re being contacted. What should I do?’” Dunn said. “So the first thing I said was, ‘Get an attorney.’”
Dunn had a name for the thing before anyone in Washington would put one on it. “I said, ‘I call it the Trump Power Plant,” Dunn said. “And they were like, ‘OK.’” Then he asked the question that may have decided the whole thing.
“‘Do you want to sell your property? And is this life-changing money for you?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, this is life-changing money.’ So I said, ‘Whatever deadline they put in front of you, meet that deadline, because they’re going to go wherever they have the easiest path.’”
They met the deadlines. It is coming here.
The project is the East Riverside Energy Center, and it will sit in Luzerne Township on the Fayette County bank of the Monongahela River.
A NextEra development executive, speaking on background, laid out the plan in detail: the company holds purchase options on roughly 700 contiguous acres along the river. About 150 of those acres would carry the plant itself: three combined-cycle power blocks, each in a two-on-one configuration — two gas turbines feeding a single steam turbine — at roughly 1,250 megawatts apiece. Commercial operation is targeted phase-by-phase in 2030, 2031, and 2032, with all of it interconnected to the PJM Interconnection regional grid.
Of the $17 billion allocated to Pennsylvania, the executive said, $13 billion is for East Riverside. The company projects roughly 2,000 construction jobs and about 100 permanent positions.
NextEra’s argument is that nobody’s built more natural gas power plants over the last 20 years than it has, and that expertise is why it was elected in March on behalf of the federal government as a developer for the natural gas generation project.
For Dunn, the figure is the story.
“This is absolutely the most significant investment in the county — and that’s not to disrespect anybody who’s made investments and started businesses in the county,” he said. “I mean, this scale. This is beyond anything that we kind of comprehend could be here.”
Dunn said the company made clear that Fayette was just one option among several.
“They were saying, ‘Hey, we’re considering multiple sites, and this could be here, this could be there. It could be in different counties. They could pick a different site and have three sites instead of just one site,’” he said. “And so basically I said, ‘What does it take to get all of that here?’”
He pitched what a rural county has to pitch: opportunity zones, enterprise zones, the state programs on the shelf, and all while conceding that they were probably beside the point.
“Those are through the state, and those programs, quite frankly, might not be big enough to even matter in a project this size,” he said. “But I put the push on, and can’t believe that it works somehow.”
What Fayette actually had was land that nobody else wanted.
“This is old coal property, an old coal mine property that doesn’t have a reuse available to it. You can’t grow anything on these properties,” Dunn said. “So if you’re going to build something like this, what a better place than reusing a property that otherwise has no use, and you’re so far away from neighbors that you’re not going to bother anybody.”
NextEra confirmed the parcels within the footprint were surface-mined for coal and have since been reclaimed, with other active and yet-to-be-reclaimed mines nearby along the river.
The record is more specific than either man volunteered. Downriver at Labelle, J&L Steel built a coal preparation plant in 1950 to wash the output of the Vesta mines across the water in Washington County, running a conveyor over the Mon to feed it. Vesta No. 4 and No. 5 were mined out by the 1970s. The plant limped on under later owners, the state took a half-interest in the processing company in the mid-1990s, and the site’s final industrial use was as a place to dump fly ash to stabilize a mountain of refuse.
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Eighty years ago, this bend in the river was the center of the coke economy. The Connellsville seam held some of the best coking coal on Earth. By the 1880s, Fayette County produced nearly half the coke in the country, and in the 1920s, Uniontown was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city in America. Luzerne Township has about 5,000 people today — half what it held at the peak.
Dunn said he pressed on the two questions that a county has to press.
Power draw was the easy one. “This will actually add to the grid, or capacity to the grid,” he said, adding, as for water, ”They’ll apply for a draw out of the Monongahela, and they had mentioned how they process some of the water. Some of the water is treated and returned to the Mon, but the actual way that happens is more of a question for them than for me.”
His confidence rests on a precedent sitting up the same shoreline. Duke Energy broke ground on the Fayette Energy Facility in Masontown in 2002, a $400 million investment, and the 620-megawatt combined-cycle plant went commercial in May 2003 on a 300-acre riverfront site.
“Fayette County already has a power plant,” Dunn said. “It’s not on this scale, but it is along the Monongahela River. We don’t get any complaints about that. We don’t get a noise complaint or air quality or anything like that. So we’re not unfamiliar with a gas-powered power plant.”
He is not expecting a quiet reception. Asked whether he anticipates opposition, he did not hesitate. “Yeah. And that’s part of it. So we’re kind of planning on that.”
The eventual owner of the site will be a special-purpose vehicle standing in for the United States and Japanese governments. NextEra was elected as developer and will be the eventual operator of the generation footprint.
“That special purpose vehicle will be a taxpaying entity,” the executive said — the sentence Luzerne Township and the Albert Gallatin Area School District will care about most.
On Aug. 12, NextEra announced that it had executed definitive agreements with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the government of Japan, releasing the first tranche of funding for the Pennsylvania and Texas projects. The money is earmarked for down payments on long-lead equipment — turbines above all — and for selecting engineering and construction contractors.
Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) put it in the register that the valley understands: “The Mon Valley region built the steel that built America. Now it’s going to build the power that fuels America’s future.”
In March, nobody would say that much. Neither the White House nor the company would provide a location or a construction date.
The project is an opportunity for the Marcellus Shale to produce natural gas that is then consumed by a power plant in Pennsylvania, specifically in Fayette County, to produce electricity that ultimately ends up on the grid in the Keystone State. Supply agreements are still being negotiated, as are contracts with engineering and procurement firms. Pipeline expansion would add work beyond the fence line. A larger economic impact study is promised later.
The timing is not incidental. PJM’s July capacity auction for the 2028-29 delivery year fell 6.8 gigawatts short of its reliability requirement, with prices at the cap, and the grid operator has warned that starting in June 2027 the region will miss required reserves.
Fayette County is, by any honest measure, one of the most beautiful places in Pennsylvania.
The National Park Service keeps three places here, and all three are about beginnings. At Fort Necessity, a 22-year-old Virginian named George Washington surrendered on the Fourth of July, 1754, and set a world war in motion. At Jumonville Glen, 7 miles off, the shot that started it was fired weeks earlier, with him in the thick of it. And above the Monongahela at Point Marion stands Friendship Hill, the home Albert Gallatin built before he became the longest-serving treasury secretary in American history and financed the Louisiana Purchase and the expedition that mapped what lay beyond it.
It is also one of the poorest counties. Its poverty rate stands near 16.8%, well above the rest of the state, and its population has fallen by nearly 10% since 2010.
Dunn has been a commissioner since late 2019, and he has spent much of that time saying one thing to anyone who would listen. He said it again, and it was the closest he came to sounding vindicated.
“We have been telling people for three or four years: Fayette County can fuel the next revolution, which is data centers, and we can add power to the grid,” he said. “We’ve been saying this for three or four years. And for it to finally come true is very exciting for us.”
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There will be an end user for a share of the power. There isn’t one yet.
The trade deal signed in 2025 leaves that call to a U.S. investment committee chaired by the commerce secretary. This is subject to Japan’s approval and funding, and puts the cost of building the plant on Japanese capital repaid through the offtake, not on local ratepayers. And whoever the buyer turns out to be: a data center, an industrial project, or something else, they will not be built here on the site.