By Laila Kearney and Sumit Saha
(Reuters) -Pennsylvania electric and gas utility PPL and Blackstone Infrastructure have formed a joint venture to build natural gas generation stations to power data centers under long-term energy services agreements, the companies said on Tuesday.
“We’re excited to leverage the powerful expertise that PPL and Blackstone Infrastructure possess to bring much-needed new dispatchable generation online in Pennsylvania to match new data center load,” said PPL President and CEO Vincent Sorgi in a statement.
The announcement came during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh, where government, technology, and energy officials announced roughly $90 billion in investments in advancing data centers and other aspects of the artificial intelligence boom.
U.S. President Donald Trump was expected to be in attendance.
The joint venture, of which PPL owns 51% and Blackstone Infrastructure owns the remaining 49%, will seek to sign long-term energy service agreements with large data center companies, the companies said.
No such agreements have been reached yet.
“The joint venture is actively engaged with landowners, natural gas pipeline companies and turbine manufacturers, and has secured multiple land parcels to enable this new generation buildout,” according to the statement.
(Reporting by Sumit Saha in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Rod Nickel)
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