York County to host $5 billion data center in Peach Bottom

Note in the actual article that the data center will be built at Calpine gas plant in York County, not at the (nearby) Peach Bottom nuclear plant. I.e., colocating the 800+ MW data center at a gas plant implies that it will principally be powered by gas generation.
 
Also, note that the owner of the Peach Bottom reactors, Constellation, is in the process of acquiring Calpine and all of its gas generation plants, as part of its business strategy to capture as many PPA deals with data center developers as possible, knowing that increased utilization of gas plants is the default option for power hyperscale data centers where renewable energy development is happening too slowly to provide sufficient new generation. It will also have two perverse effects that will impose higher costs on other consumers:
  • higher market electricity prices driven by higher demand and marginal costs of gas
  • higher capacity market clearing prices, due to both higher peak loads from data centers and Constellation's market power in withholding some capacity and upbidding some capacity in the capacity auctions. Constellation has been doing this for years with its nuclear fleet in PJM, but once the Calpine acquisition goes through, it will have even greater market power.
Submitted by admin on Sun, 07/20/2025 - 14:18