A pair of Ohio River Valley gas plant projects would be the largest, most expensive energy developments in US history. But as the price of gas power soars and demand remains uncertain, there’s a chance that taxpayers and utility customers could get stuck with a big bill.
In announcements on February 19 and March 19, 2026 the White House unveiled plans to build natural gas-fired power plants in Piketon, Ohio and the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania that will have a combined capacity of 13.5 Gigawatts (GW) – enough to power roughly 10 million households. The 9.2 GW Piketon facility was said to represent an investment of $33 billion and the Mon Valley facility $17 billion.
At nearly twice the generating capacity of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, the two projects constitute the largest power system development in the nation’s history. And, at a combined cost of $50 billion, the projects are 34% more expensive than the infamous Plant Vogtle nuclear project in Georgia that cost $37 billion and whose impact on customers’ electric bills resulted in Georgia voters throwing out of office the incumbents on Georgia’s Public Service Commission.
But Plant Vogtle isn’t the financial disaster of which the Piketon and Mon Valley projects are most reminiscent. That distinction falls to the Washington Public Power Service System (WPPSS) project to build five nuclear power plants in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and early 1980s. The reason WPPSS, which acquired the unfortunate nickname “Whoops”, doesn’t make the list of the largest power projects ever is that it collapsed financially after just one of the five proposed plants was built.
The failure to build the four remaining plants cost municipal bond investors $2.25 billion, at the time the largest municipal bond default in the nation’s history. Because the investors consisted mostly of 88 public utilities, public utility districts, and electric co-ops, the ultimate bill was paid mostly by customers. So, why are the Piketon and Mon Valley projects reminiscent of WPPS? Two reasons, one disturbing and the other worse.
Like WPPSS, Piketon and Mon Valley are responses to expected demand growth. In the case of our region, this anticipated demand is driven by data center expansion whereas, in the case of WPPSS, anticipated population and industrial expansion were expected to drive load growth. The fundamental problem with WPPSS was that the expected demand didn’t materialize. Increases in the Pacific Northwest’s population were almost entirely offset by improvements in energy efficiency and by the region’s evolution away from heavy industry toward a more service-based economy.
Because of the many uncertainties surrounding artificial intelligence and its implications, similar doubts haunt expected data center expansion in our region. If demand for electricity doesn’t grow at the pace or to the degree that’s expected, we may be left with quite a bit of underutilized and very expensive generating capacity.
Equally worrying is the cost of the proposed plants. With a combined price tag of $50 billion, the 13.5 GW of planned generating capacity will cost $3,700/kw, which is an astonishingly high price. Amid the current crush in demand for gas-fired power, developers have recently been paying as much as $2,500/kw for new plants. That means the new projects will cost nearly 50% more than the market rate, which is itself already highly inflated.
As recently as December 2023, the Energy Information Administration reported that the cost of building a new gas-fired power plant was less than $900/kw, making the cost of the Piketon and Mon Valley facilities more than four times that of nearly any gas-fired power plant operating today. This is a consequence of deciding to add new gas-fired capacity at a time when demand for turbines and other equipment required by the new plants is at an all-time high.
Facilities that cost that much to build can never be a source of low-cost energy. Far from reducing electricity rates as Energy Secretary Chris Wright claims, they will raise them. Either that or those operating the plants will lose money. Of course, there is a third, worst case possibility; customers’ rates may rise and the owners may also lose money.
Still, there are hopes for redemption. One is that data center developers and operators will absorb the projects’ entire cost. The possibility is remote however because it would require significant changes in how utilities are regulated and how they allocate costs among customers. It’s true that President Trump recently announced a pledge by hyperscalers to insulate existing customers from cost increases induced by data centers. However, neither utilities nor state regulators were signatories to the pledge, which in any case is unenforceable – a fact of which customers in Pennsylvania and Ohio are constantly reminded as they watch data centers drive up their monthly bills with no mention, at least so far, of refunds or rebates.
There remains one other possible outcome. As with WPPSS and a later tech-fueled power sector boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, financial reality may come crashing down on the projects before they are completed, leaving investors and/or customers holding a very large bag. In the case of WPPSS the bag takes the shape of the world’s largest tombstone – an immense cooling tower for the never completed Satsop nuclear power station that 50 years later sits abandoned in rural Washington as a monument to the wages of power system miscalculation.