HOMER CITY, Pennsylvania — A couple of days after the iconic towers of a coal fired power plant were flattened and seemingly all hope was lost after all of the jobs were gone in the rubble, Shawn Steffee, a local labor leader and agent for the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local 154 whispered in my ear, “This isn’t the end, this is beginning.”
Steffee wasn’t wrong. A year ago, he stood with his family and neighbors on a hill overlooking the Homer City Generating Station, the community where he grew up gathered around him, and watched the demolition of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant shake the ground as Unit 3’s tower collapsed into rubble.
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Within days, he was on the phone delivering big news: Homer City Redevelopment would build a $10 billion natural gas power plant on the former coal site, transforming it into a major source of electricity for the surging demand from new data centers.
It took me less than an hour to get to the site and see that work was already underway. Construction trucks were moving in and out of the decommissioned plant, and workers in hard hats were crossing the property even before the project had been announced to the public.
On Friday, Homer City Redevelopment CEO Corey Hessen delivered the keynote to a packed crowd of business leaders, academics, and blue-collar workers, all of whom will play a role in what he and other industry leaders are building as the region’s next big chapter in energy and industry.
Hessen said in his speech that after the coal-fired power plant was decommissioned in 2023, he began reimagining what the site could become. As he put it, “I like to say that we identify value in unexpected places.”
Few people fully grasp how broadly artificial intelligence is likely to reshape their lives, or how much power the data centers behind it will require. For many, AI is still mostly associated with job loss and economic displacement. In places like western Pennsylvania, where people know all too well what subtraction looks like, that fear carries real weight.
Here in western Pennsylvania, though, the story is different. With vast energy reserves beneath our feet, infrastructure already in place, a legacy of skilled trade workers known for their work ethic, and access to top research, engineering, and robotics institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, innovators are not talking about subtraction. They are talking about addition.
More than 1,000 workers are already on site, with thousands more expected to come aboard. Hessen said data center customers are projected to consume roughly 3,700 of the 4,500 megawatts the new campus is expected to generate.
The event was the second Pennsylvania Data Center and Energy Innovation Summit, sponsored by the Pittsburgh Technology Council. During the summit, the council, together with the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies, released a report titled “Pennsylvania Builds the Cloud: Manufacturing, Energy, and Data Center Development.”
The study, conducted by Mangum Economics, found that Pennsylvania is emerging as a global leader in digital infrastructure and is uniquely positioned to generate broad-based job growth in the digital economy by capitalizing on data center development, advanced manufacturing, and energy generation and distribution.
What makes Western Pennsylvania unique is that while other states focus on one of those capabilities, Pennsylvania’s opportunity is in successfully scaling all three simultaneously to secure a unique role in America’s digital future.
Already, Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania are leading in two of those areas: manufacturing and energy generation and distribution.
Audrey Russo, CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council, said that for the first time in generations, more factories are being built and expanded in western Pennsylvania than are closing, and that is no accident. “These facilities are being purpose-built to manufacture the components and energy infrastructure that the global cloud runs on,” Russo said. “Pittsburgh didn’t wait to be discovered. We created the environment, and the investment followed.”
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From U.S. Steel’s mills to the transformers produced at Cleveland-Cliffs Butler Works, from the energy still buried beneath the region to the research and development expertise of its universities, and from the skilled men and women who build it all, western Pennsylvania has the power, talent, and capacity to build ahead of demand and position itself at the forefront of industry.
By the time AI fully powers up, innovators here will already have laid the groundwork for the future, much as the pioneers of the second industrial revolution did after Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania in 1859, a discovery that helped launch a wave of industries that would drive growth and shape the world for generations.