Louisiana Moves Ahead with Contentious Gas Power Plants for Meta Data Center

I went to Louisiana Tech University, met the wife there too, she’s from Baton Rouge.

I still have a very good friend who grew up in Newellton, Louisiana, and now he lives in Monroe, Louisiana.

When we were in college, he took me to meet his parents who lived on a farm just outside of Newellton.

If you take a drive in the Google car now 44 years later, that little boarded up town of Newellton hasn’t changed one iota, and it’s still a little boarded up one stop light town.

I met a lot of other kids at Louisiana Tech who grew up in little one stop light towns or even less who were also from northeast Louisiana.

Yesterday was the first I’ve heard of “Project Sucre” when Trump showed a picture of the future building overlayed the island of Manhattan and the building would take up 80% of the island.

Now Meta is building in the middle of nowhere, on nothing but farm land, a 4m sq ft building with three dedicated natural gas fired power plants which in total can supply twice the amount of electricity as the demands of the entire city of New Orleans on the hottest of summer days.

It’s located on the north side of IH20 by about three miles, heading east on IH20 take Exit 145 for Holly Ridge and go north on Highway 183 about three miles, it will be on the southwest corner of 183 and Burn Road, you can’t miss it.

“Meta’s Hyperion data center [Project Sucre] is located on a 2,250-acre site in Richland Parish, Louisiana, between the towns of Rayville and Delhi. It is a massive, AI-optimized campus and will be Meta’s largest data center to date, with a planned 4 million square feet of buildings. Construction on the project began in late 2024 and is expected to continue through 2030.”

Meta’s Hyperion Data Center is going to be a huge boon to the economy where there used to be nothing other then what the kids at college called “farm’en beans.”

“I’d rather be hopeful about future progress than terrified about future poverty,” Rep Echols said.

CNBC

To land Meta’s massive $10 billion data center, Louisiana pulled out all the stops. Will it be worth it?

Meta is building the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere on a sprawling site in rural Northeastern Louisiana.

Louisiana was one of the few states that could deliver a site as large as Meta needed — the equivalent of about 1,700 football fields. …

Last June, only six months after taking office, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a 20-year sales tax exemption for data centers built before 2029. The fact that the state was courting Meta at the time was not disclosed.

The state offered billions of dollars in tax breaks to win the project, and the local utility will supply three new power plants.

The Louisiana Public Service Commission is considering the utility’s proposal to build three new power plants. But a citizen’s group, Alliance for Affordable Energy, is warning that the project could compromise the state’s power grid and increase electricity rates statewide.

“While they’re building new power plants, they’re also adding a huge consumer of electricity,” said Jackson Voss, Climate Policy Coordinator for the group. “Which means we’re all still facing the same vulnerabilities that we were before, but now with a huge new data center added on.” …

Entergy’s May said that the added generation capacity for the Meta facility — including 1,500 megawatts of solar power in addition to the gas-fired plants — will make the grid more stable, not less. And he said the project will ultimately reduce electric bills across the state.

Data centers have become a major economic development battleground for many states, even though they provide relatively few jobs and consume massive amounts of resources.

“This massive $10 billion investment, coupled with the billions of dollars that we’re going to invest ourselves, is going to bring new opportunities for these communities,” Entergy’s May said.

“500 jobs in Richland Parish, or even in this northeast Louisiana region, is transformational,” Bourgeois said.

Governor Landry also pushed back on the criticism that the project only creates 500 jobs. “I’ll take it. Five jobs was a big deal in this area. I don’t know where the people are who complain about 500 jobs, but I’ll take them in Louisiana,” Landry said. “We will take every job we can get.“

He added that the 5,000 construction jobs begin to “build out” the economic story. …

“This wasn’t about what the state would win or lose, just that one isolated sales tax,” Secretary of Economic Development Susan Bourgeois told CNBC. “This was about we want to compete with Texas. We want to compete with Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, all our Southern neighbors.”