NIPSCO is looking to build a massive natural gas power plant to power new data centers, adding as much additional capacity as its entire current customer base consumes.
The Merrillville-based utility filed paperwork with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management seeking permission to build a 2,300 MW natural gas plant. The project is planned at the Schahfer Generating Station in Jasper County, where it is retiring coal-fired electricity generation and also planning a natural gas peaker to supplement wind and solar energy production.
NIPSCO spokeswoman Jessica Cantarelli said the new electric capacity would serve data centers.
“Our filing Monday confirms NIPSCO has entered into a contract to serve a data center customer,” Cantarelli said. "We do not have any additional information to share and look forward to sharing more on our third-quarter earnings call."
The Schahfer Generating Station in Wheatfield now has two coal-fired utility boilers, as well as ancillary units and two combustion turbines. NIPSCO filed plans last year to build a natural gas peaker with 400 MW of capacity to ensure the lights would stay on when solar panels got no sunshine and wind turbines went still due to the lack of a breeze.
NIPSCO filed plans seeking to build four combined cycle combustion turbines with electrical generators and heat recovery steam generators, according to the IDEM filing. It would be arranged into two blocks and would include mechanical draft cooling towers, auxiliary boilers, a natural gas dew-point heater, sulfur hexafluoride, insulated high voltage circuit breakers, natural gas piping components, emergency diesel generators, emergency diesel fire pumps and other ancillary support equipment.
NIPSCO has not yet provided information on the cost of the project or how it would be recovered from data center customers.
NIPSCO’s Integrated Resource Plan calls for the addition of new natural gas plants to power data centers, large collections of computer servers that support streaming, GPS navigation, social media and especially the rise of artificial intelligence.
The project would essentially double NIPSCO’s current capacity in order to serve the data centers expecting to come online in the next few years.
“NIPSCO's entire peak demand for existing customers is about 2,300 MW, and it does not have a need for a resource this size to serve existing customers,” Citizens Action Coalition Program Director Ben Inskeep said.
The project likely would be the largest in the state to serve data centers, Inskeep said, and would release more greenhouse gases than all but one power plant in Indiana, including most coal-fired plants.
“The IDEM filing shows the plant could emit more than 7 million tons per year of CO2, which is more than any other power plant in Indiana except for Duke's massive coal-fired Gibson power plant, according to EPA GHG reporting. It is also more than double the 3.3 million tons of CO2 emitted by NIPSCO's existing coal-fired power plants in Michigan City and Schahfer," Inskeep said.
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