Huge gas plant eyed to power mystery $5 billion Louisiana data center

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In rural northeast Louisiana, known for its rice, sweet potato farms and poverty, an as-yet-to-be-named company has agreed to build a new data center with an investment of at least $5 billion. The development is being called a “godsend” and a “game changer” for the region, where one in five people lives in poverty.

Next to the site, off Interstate 20 in Holly Ridge, electric utility Entergy plans to build a 1,500-megawatt natural gas plant to power the data center. The data center, the power plant, or possibly both, will be built on a 1,400-acre site, called Franklin Farms, owned by the state, according to filings with the Louisiana Public Service Commission. Entergy would spend $3.2 billion on the plant, a related 754-megawatt gas plant to be built in south Louisiana and transmission lines.

Over the past several months, concern has arisen that the construction of fossil-fueled power plants to provide power to the proliferation of U.S. data centers will slow progress on the nation’s climate change goals.

“Entergy is proposing to add huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions,
with proposals to mitigate those emissions ‘in the future’ with largely unproven technologies,” said Whit Cox, regulatory director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, which has filed to intervene in Entergy’s request. And a Louisiana utility consumer group questions whether the cost of the new plants will be passed onto residential customers.

Details about the data center are cloaked in secrecy and non-disclosure agreements. But Entergy Louisiana has filed hundreds of pages of redacted documents with state regulators about its dealings with the unnamed company. In its filings, Entergy says the data center will employ 300 to 500 people with an average salary of $82,000. The utility calls the development a “game changer” that will bring “an historic investment” to the region.

The utility is asking the Louisiana PSC to approve construction of the new power plant — where the primary customer will be the data center — within 10 months.

With the development, Louisiana would join a cohort of states building natural gas power plants to meet the pressing demand for electricity to run data centers being built by Amazon, Meta, Google and others.

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“We see (the gas buildout) as a huge threat — we are at a moment where we need to be phasing out fossil fuels and not locking it in for decades longer,” Gudrun Thompson, energy program leader for the Southern Environmental Law Center told Floodlight earlier this year.??

The company building the Louisiana data center appears to be aware of those concerns and is working with Entergy to offset its emissions according to Entergy’s filings. The company wants Entergy to build or acquire 1,500 MW of solar power elsewhere to offset its emissions in Holly Ridge.

Additionally, the unnamed company is “expected to make a substantial contribution” toward the cost of carbon capture and storage at Entergy Louisiana’s new Lake Charles 994 MW gas power plant.

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Costs not paid by the data center, either through electricity rates or separate agreements, would be spread across Entergy’s 1.1 million Louisiana customers, although the utility says the proposed deal “largely insulates (Entergy’s) other customers from paying for the upgrades required” for the data center.

“We’ve got a lot of questions regarding cost allocation, but also concerns about how much this has been fast-tracked,” the Alliance for Affordable Energy said in a recent newsletter.

On Nov. 20, the PSC will take up the project for the first time as it considers hiring outside consultants to help evaluate the proposal. In addition to the Southern Renewable Energy Association, the Large Energy Users Group, consisting of major industrial energy users including Chevron and Dow, has requested to intervene in the case.

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