Three states woke up Friday to new fossil-gas data-center plans either announced (Ohio, Virginia) or fought (Wisconsin). A 1,700-megawatt gas plant landed on the front pages of five Ohio Valley papers. Dominion told Cumberland County it wants to build the largest gas plant in its Virginia fleet. Wisconsin's three-member Public Service Commission, unanimously, told Meta and Alliant Energy that the secrecy-and-NDA model is over. And the demand-side context the day's stories are responding to came into sharper focus too — Anthropic's CEO told a developer conference Wednesday that the AI startup is on track to grow 80 times its size this year, which is helping force the chip-and-grid buildout that everyone else is now arguing about.
Omaha-based Tenaska went to the Jefferson County, Ohio commissioners on Thursday and unveiled plans for a natural-gas-fueled power plant on a 562-acre parcel in Saline Township, capable of generating up to 1,700 megawatts. Thirty CO2 injection wells have already been permitted across a six-county footprint — Jefferson, Harrison, and Carroll counties in Ohio; Hancock and Marshall in West Virginia; and Washington County, Pennsylvania. Tenaska is now calling the combined project the Tri-State Energy Hub. Construction could start in 2028 with the plant online in late 2032 or early 2033. About 25 permanent jobs.
"We've always considered CCS an enabler, a business solution for existing industry but also an opportunity to attract new business investment," said Ali Kairys, Tenaska's senior director of project development. "PJM, which operates the local grid here, is in need of reliable power generation locally and this project will offer a solution."
Jefferson County commissioners Jake Kleineke, Eric Timmons, and Tony Morelli all voiced support. The CCS-side economic impact is estimated at around $1 billion; a study on the power-plant side is due later this summer.
Source: Linda Harris / Herald-Star.
All three commissioners on Wisconsin's Public Service Commission criticized Meta and Alliant Energy on Thursday for the months of secrecy that surrounded Meta's $1 billion-plus Beaver Dam hyperscale data-center project — and then ordered Alliant to build a standardized public tariff for any data center using more than 100 megawatts, rather than continue with one-off contracts negotiated under non-disclosure agreements. The Meta campus is expected to use 220 megawatts. The PSC made the same call in WE Energies territory late last month.
"Existing Wisconsin customers should not pay a single cent to subsidize the service of data centers, not now and not decades from now," said Commissioner Kristy Nieto. "This means these very large customers must bear the full cost of the infrastructure required to serve them — generation, transmission and distribution — and that those costs must be fully and transparently assigned."
Chair Summer Strand: "Transparency — and by that I mean actual and real transparency — is the foundational expectation and a necessity." Wisconsin is now the second state PSC inside two weeks to put the tariff requirement in writing.
Source: Wisconsin Examiner.
Dominion Energy announced plans Thursday for a 3,000-megawatt combined-cycle natural-gas plant on 900 acres in Cumberland County, Virginia, north of the James River. If approved, it would be by far the largest gas plant in Dominion's Virginia fleet. The full cost is described as multi-billion dollar; Dominion's spokesman confirmed it will exceed the $1.47 billion Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center, the 944-MW gas peaker the State Corporation Commission approved late last year over fierce community opposition.
The number worth holding onto is in Dominion's most recent integrated resource plan: to meet projected demand, the company expects to build six new natural-gas plants over the next 20 years.
"PJM is forecasting that our demand will grow on average by about 5% annually over the next 20 years and more than doubling by 2045," said Jeremy Slayton, a Dominion spokesman. "To meet this unprecedented demand growth reliably and affordably, we are going to need to generate twice as much energy to keep up with that demand into the future."
The application process will take about two years. Construction would start in 2029 and the plant would come online in 2033 or 2034. Public meetings in Cumberland County are scheduled for later this month and June.
Source: Virginia Mercury.
Wednesday, the Maricopa County, Arizona Board of Supervisors approved Project Baccara — a 160-acre data-center campus with two data centers, an 18-stack gas turbine yard, and thousands of gallons of backup propane near a Glendale-adjacent neighborhood — by a 4-1 vote on its military compatibility permit. The developer is Takanock Inc., the Michigan-based firm. Roughly 440 emails in opposition; 22 people spoke against at the meeting; 3 spoke in favor.
The same week, in Strasburg, Virginia, the Northern Virginia Daily walked through the site plan for Project Tallmadge — also Takanock. Two 160-MW data center buildings on 78 acres along Borden Mowery Drive, with rows of 90,000-gallon LPG storage tanks identified in the plan legend, paired with a vaporizer/blender skid that converts liquid propane into gas for the turbines. At the March 2025 public hearing, the developer told residents the project would use natural gas, not diesel — propane storage was not described.
"While Project Baccara is the first of its kind in the state, it won't be the last," Jason Moyes, an attorney for Takanock, told Arizona state officials last year, per the Arizona Republic.
A second Takanock data-center proposal near Eloy, Arizona is already pursuing the same self-power-plus-solar template.
Sources: Arizona Republic; CNN Wire / KNXV / ABC15; Northern Virginia Daily.
Speaking at the company's developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the AI startup had planned for roughly 10x growth this year and is now tracking 80x growth instead. Anthropic's annual revenue run rate has gone from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $30 billion now.
"I hope that 80-times growth doesn't continue because that's just crazy and it's too hard to handle," Amodei said. "I'm hoping for some more normal numbers."
To meet the compute demand, Anthropic announced at the same conference a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX to use all of the computing capacity from the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis — more than 220,000 Nvidia A.I. chips. That is the same Colossus facility powered by the 33-turbine gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi that the NAACP, Earthjustice, and the Southern Environmental Law Center asked a federal court Wednesday to shut down for Clean Air Act violations.
Last month, Google committed to invest as much as another $40 billion in Anthropic. Amazon agreed to invest as much as $25 billion.
Source: New York Times, page B3.
Have a tip? The Docket tracks zoning hearings, ordinance drafts, rate cases, transmission disputes, and community organizing efforts that often don't reach print. Send leads to [email protected]. Sources protected by default.
This is a daily signals brief from Development Docket. The Docket's full editorial standards apply to attribution, sourcing, and corrections. Briefs do not include “Community Takeaways” or “What You Can Do” sections — those appear in the Docket's longer pieces.
We'll email you when there's a story about energy or data center development near you.