A Pennsylvania Coal Plant Closed in 2019. The Data Center Taking Its Place Comes With a Gas Plant Projected to Pollute More Than Any Other One in the State's Pipeline.

Patricia Lamb lives in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, a borough of roughly 160 people tucked into a bend of the Ohio River in Beaver County. She isn't against what's coming. She just wants the company building it to do what it said it would. She's said she hopes the developer follows through on its promises and gives straight answers on how the project will actually handle its water and its power. What's coming is Project Phoenix: a $10 billion, three-building, 2-gigawatt data center campus that Aligned Data Centers broke ground on September 10th, built on the same industrial land where one of Pennsylvania's largest coal plants ran for more than four decades.

The site has done this before

The Bruce Mansfield Power Station burned coal on this stretch of the Ohio River from 1976 until 2019, at roughly 2.49 gigawatts one of the largest plants of its kind in the state. Its owner, FirstEnergy, settled a federal Clean Air Act case in 2009 over more than 250 alleged emissions violations dating back to 2002. When the plant finally closed, the Frontier Group of Companies bought the 660-acre site and started pitching it as a brownfield comeback story well before anyone was talking about AI campuses here: in January 2024, Rep. Chris Deluzio announced a $100,000 federal grant to the Beaver County Corporation for Economic Development to help plan the site's reuse. 'I am thrilled to announce this grant to help revitalize our community's energy assets and support great jobs in Western Pennsylvania,' Deluzio said at the time. BCCED president Lew Villotti called the site, with Frontier's backing, a shot at becoming 'an economic success story for the whole region.' That was more than a year before Aligned signed on.

A power plant built to skip the queue

Aligned says Project Phoenix will run on its own dedicated on-site generation instead of drawing from the local grid, which is the real reason a site like this gets built in the first place. A 2-gigawatt load would sit in a regional grid operator's interconnection queue for years; pairing the campus with a purpose-built power plant on the same land, under the same ownership, is how developers are increasingly routing around that wait. That's a different motive than Oracle's Project Jupiter in New Mexico, which went behind-the-meter after a pipeline it needed got denied twice — Shippingport's version was the plan from the start, not a workaround for a failure. Frontier's own numbers for the new plant have moved depending on the announcement: a 2.7-gigawatt natural-gas facility in its original 2025 plan, up to 3.6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter capacity in later accounts, built in phases starting with roughly 900 megawatts of simple-cycle generation. National Fuel Gas says the pipeline capacity to feed it should come online this fall. None of that is unusual for a project this size — but a developer's own capacity figure moving by a gigawatt between press releases is exactly the kind of number worth re-confirming before anyone treats it as fixed.

We proudly support Governor Shapiro's GRID standards and are a signatory of the Ratepayer Protection Pledge.Andrew Schaap, CEO, Aligned Data Centers

What the county is cheering, and what the neighbors are asking

Beaver County Commissioner Jack Manning has called Project Phoenix the most exciting brownfield development under consideration anywhere in Pennsylvania. Shippingport's mayor, John Erickson, says he's all for it and doesn't buy most of what he calls the misinformation circulating about data centers generally. Both are elected to represent a county that's watched a coal plant's tax base disappear since 2019, and 3,000 construction jobs plus 640 permanent ones is a real number for a place that size. But the enthusiasm isn't universal, and it isn't only about jobs. In neighboring Midland, resident Jai-Ellen St. George compared the spread of data centers in the area to Dollar General stores, asking why the region needs so many. Shippingport's own borough council had drafted a data center ordinance back in March 2025 before anyone on it knew Aligned's specific plan was coming — the borough solicitor wrote the rule first, then found out what it would actually be used for. Residents have packed public meetings over the project even as the council and mayor kept approving it, most recently a phase-two land development vote.

The number nobody in the deal has disputed

The Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit environmental watchdog, published a report in July titled "The Power Behind AI" identifying seven gas-fired plants planned statewide specifically to power Pennsylvania data centers. Homer City, a converted coal site in Indiana County, is the biggest by capacity, at roughly 4.5 gigawatts once fully built out, and the report projects it would emit more than 17.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. Shippingport's plant, smaller on paper, is projected to emit more: 21.1 million tons a year, the highest of the seven. Together, the report says, all seven plants would add about 68 million tons of CO2-equivalent annually — a 24 percent increase over Pennsylvania's entire 2022 emissions total. Lead author Griffin Bird put the combined figure in car terms: equivalent to more than doubling the number of cars and trucks on the state's roads. The Data Center Coalition, the industry's trade group, declined to confirm the 68-million-ton number when asked about the report.

I think the useful comparison here isn't Homer City's size, it's Homer City's paper trail. Homer City's air permit was issued by Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection in November 2025, and environmental groups are already fighting it in public, filing challenges and naming a DEP-permitted number they can argue against. Frontier's Shippingport plant doesn't show up in that fight yet, which most likely just means its own air permit application hasn't been filed or decided. Aligned's signature on the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge is a voluntary commitment about who pays for new generation, not a regulatory limit on what that generation can emit — those are two different documents, and only one of them will actually cap this plant's smokestack.

The jobs, the tax base, and the $10 billion in capital are arriving on a schedule Aligned and Frontier control, and groundbreaking photos are already out. The number that decides how much this plant actually pollutes belongs to a regulator, not a developer, and it hasn't been set yet. Shippingport got its headline first. The permit, and the real argument over that 21.1-million-ton estimate, is still ahead of it.