The crack of crashing concrete from Indiana County’s 55-year-old coal-powered plant in March heralded a new phase in energy production across Southwestern Pennsylvania, and a likely turning point for the small-town economy it fueled.
“It took part of your heart away, it like just cut at you, you know, that’s Homer City, that’s the power plant and all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘We’re tearing tearing it down,’” said Joe Iezzi, the Homer City Borough council president, interviewed during a Good Friday parade among some of the town’s churches. “So yeah, but that’s what happens, you know, it’s progress, I guess.”
The power needs of energy-hungry artificial intelligence [AI] bring a new generation of natural gas-related plants and expansions to Western Pennsylvania, including developments in Westmoreland and Washington counties.
Homer City’s transformation may be the most dramatic.
The Homer City Generating Station, just outside of the borough in Center Township, was demolished by its owner, New York-based financial firm Knighthead Capital Management, to make room for a new $10 billion natural gas-powered plant expected to be running in 2027. It is being billed as the country’s largest natural gas power plant. Some see jobs, but ask if there are local workers to fill them. Others want tax revenue, but are anxious that it can come soon enough. And a few question how a huge gas plant would coexist with other options, like nature tourism and agriculture.
Iezzi recalled how the old coal-powered plant dominated the local landscape since the generators began operating in 1969.
The plant shut down in 2023. Homer City Redevelopment, LLC, with Knighthead’s backing, and Kiewit Power Constructors plan to build the gas-fired plant, capable of producing up to 4.5 gigawatts, enough to power about 3 million homes. The company also plans on data centers around the plant, declining to share specifics but noting in an email response to PublicSource’s questions that “there is a list of blue-chip companies who are looking to build large data center campuses. The property has multiple potential development paths and whether it goes to one or a combination has not yet been determined.”
Knighthead created the redevelopment organization to explore, develop and implement the redevelopment plans at the 3,200-acre site.
Iezzi said the news has been difficult. “Because you go around Homer City, a lot of people that live in Homer City work[ed] there. Just like the coal mines. We have a lot of coal miners. Coal mines closed, those poor guys were out. I don’t like to see that.”
But the council president remained optimistic. “We’ll make it work somehow. We’ll make it.”
Aging population, shrinking services
To make it work, Homer City and surrounding Center Township must juggle a number of factors that have led to a withering tax base and a demographic shift. The area is experiencing a distilled version of what the country as a whole is facing: a population steadily aging while younger generations are choosing to have fewer children.
As the Good Friday parade made its way through town, Dave Kelly sat for a haircut at Kosmack’s Barber Shop and said he used to live in Homer City but moved away a few years ago to Monessen.
“Homer City has changed a lot since I moved,” he said. “I’ve been gone for six years now. Like just everything went downhill, no businesses or nothing, but I heard it’s coming back up.”
Iezzi said he hopes that the new plant would create more opportunities for the community, and perhaps more people would move to the area to boost the borough’s population of around 1,700, which skews older than Pennsylvania as a whole.
“So there’s not a big tax base coming in to help,” he said. “You need tax dollars to do everything.”
Iezzi said that there are three full-time employees doubling as water authority workers and borough managers. “When we have a water break, they take care of the water break. When we have snow plowing, they take care of the snow plowing. We work together and they’re a great bunch of guys so we’re fortunate,” he said.
The borough has three part-time police.
“Hopefully that’ll change some day,” Iezzi said. “You’d always like to have a couple full-time and three or four part-time, but it’s hard right now, you know.”
“We hope within a couple of years … there’s going to be people coming in to work to build a new place,” he said. “And that’ll help, you know.”
According to the redevelopment team’s statement, “A project of this scale will have a significant impact on the local tax base in a variety of ways — the project itself, the employees, and the business that will grow and prosper to support the needs of the project all will provide a much-needed revenue boost in support of the schools and the broader community.”
Public services are also being gutted and limited across Indiana County. The county’s director of emergency management, Thomas Stutzman, penned an article in March titled “Emergency services need public funding. Stat.” He argued that if the county can’t come up with a way to communally fund public services like firefighters and EMS, these services would wither away.
“Unfortunately, funding a full-time emergency medical service can’t be done with raffle ticket sales, bingo and chicken dinners,” Stutzman wrote.
Center Township Supervisor Matt Housholder worries that the positive economic impact might not come soon enough for his community.
“I’m hoping something goes up there but what do you do in the meantime?” he asked. “And are they really going to do everything they say? They’re not really letting anyone know what’s going on and I guess they don’t have to tell us anything. They can do whatever they want on their property.”
The redevelopment team said they notified the public of plans for the new plant on April 2, which is 11 days after the old coal plant’s towers were demolished.
Demolition of the Homer City Generating Station on March 22. (Video by John Beale/PublicSource)
For now, the township’s finances aren’t in trouble but if a new plant doesn’t go up, “that will hurt us,” said Householder.
The nearby school district is in a similar holding pattern.
The Homer-Center School District relied on about $750,000 in taxes from the former coal plant, according to Superintendent Ralph Cecere Jr.
Cecere said they’ve been guaranteed that tax money “during the transition.”
About 10 years ago, Cecere recalled, the school district received $1.4 million in property taxes from the Homer City Generating Plant. About half of that was lost when the plant’s owners won a tax reassessment.
“That hit us hard. We had to furlough and limit programs,” Cecere said. “When the current plant closed in 2023, we immediately began to think about what our future will look like.”
He said that if they lose the current tax allocation, “that would have us doing some tough decisions again.”
Riding a wave of gas
Potentially easing some of those tough decisions is the promise of increased demand for electricity.
“We have a lot of the access that you’d need to build out this new industry,” former Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said of AI’s power needs in an interview with Pittsburgh Works Together, explaining his role and work as executive director of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission.
“You need an immense amount of power and the only way really to do that we’ve been told is through nuclear, coal or gas,” he said. “… The quickest way to do it is with natural gas, which obviously we have in abundance in Southwestern Pennsylvania with the Marcellus and Utica shale.”
Pennsylvania has the second highest natural gas reserves in the country. And in an attempt to harness this energy, plants and manufacturing sites are being built across the region.
- Hitachi plans on expanding its three facilities in Westmoreland County to increase the company’s manufacturing of high voltage products, potentially creating more than 100 jobs.
- Liberty Energy is developing dedicated power generation to data centers and other large-load customers at an 875-acre industrial park in Washington County’s Robinson Township.
The new Homer City plant is expecting to receive seven hydrogen-enabled, gas-fired turbines sometime next year from company GE Vernova. That company’s CEO Scott Strazik noted in an April 23 earnings report that the demand for energy is high.
“To put today’s investment supercycle into perspective in terms of energy needs and decarbonization,” Strazik said, “the scale of load growth we are seeing in North America is the most significant since the post-World War II industrial buildout, but unlike then, the growth is global.”
Greener options for growth
Power generation isn’t the only factor that could help revive the area. Rob Nymick, Homer City Borough’s manager and Central Indiana County Water Authority manager, has spent the better part of his working life trying to solve the region’s downward demographic trends. The borough’s population was more than 2,400 in the 1970s.
He cautioned against putting too much hope in the expected new power plant.
“It’s going to take time for the power plant to be built and then construction jobs will come. Those are probably temporary,” he said.
“With the excitement of the power plant, I see an opportunity to make Homer City into something. We went from being known as the coal area. Maybe we can become known as a recreation area and bring people to our area to visit and stay.”
His efforts to remediate a nearby creek with an abandoned railroad date back to the ’90s. He began his environmental restoration efforts in 1996.
“And of course it fell on deaf ears because this is coal country,” he said. “The streams and environment were overlooked. Now that coal mining is gone we’re left with the mess.”
Now in his final years of civic work, Nymick continues to push for conserving nature as a way to attract people to the area.
By tackling acid mine drainage more proactively, he envisions the area becoming even more of a fishing destination than it already is.
Nymick recalled that his sons, both environmental science majors, made him aware of the promise of recreation and clean, accessible waters as economic stimulation. “The thing that opened my eyes was, my two sons are fly fishermen and they go all over the world for this stuff,” he said. “I never would have believed clean streams can attract people and [support] communities that are willing to spend money on that.”
Tourism spending in Indiana County amounted to $165.6 million in 2022 and accounted for 1,412 jobs countywide, according to county figures relying on state data.
Nymick said that for the area to recover from depopulation, “we’re going to need housing, cleaner streams, just to attract the younger generation for our school district population and our area’s population.” That generation is “more into hiking, biking, camping, kayaking, but now with our streams it’s not very attractive to recreate with all this acid mine drainage.”
One of the polluted waterways undergoing restoration is Two Lick Creek, a tributary of the Blacklick Creek that meanders through Homer City. On its way out of the city, the creek borders the Neal Farms, which recently switched from dairy to raising cattle for meat.
After a morning of sowing oats, Brian Neal recalled that his farm was started by his great grandfather in 1931, who turned to farming after quitting his job as a coal miner. He now runs the farm with his father. They own around 30 acres, rent another 150 for grazing and used to rent 10 acres from the power plant.
The Neal farm is located just a cow patty’s throw away from the power plant property.
Neal said the redevelopment team has offered to buy their property and their biggest concern is the team’s seemingly insatiable desire to buy up farmland.
“They’re buying up farmland everywhere,” Neal said. “When is this going to stop? This is fertile ground they’ll waste. … They want our site because it’s a good location near water.”
The redevelopment team declined to comment on any negotiations.
Neal continued: “These AI centers, they’ve been very tight-lipped about what they plan. We don’t know what we are going to be living by.”
For now, Neal hopes the development team will just “build on their 3,200 acres they have to work with and not try to gobble up land.”
Nymick hopes the area can rise to any environmental challenges.
“You either die quickly or hang on the best you can — we’re doing that right now — or we go all in and say this is our shot,” Nymick said. “And I’m hoping that we’re all in.”
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter, and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
This story was fact checked by Rich Lord.
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