On Monday June 9th, the Ohio Power Siting Board approved the application of the Socrates South Power Generation Project. The announcement is the usual sparse and glyphic announcement from a state regulatory body. The project is rated at 200 megawatts, it will use gas-fired generators, and its sponsor is something called Will-Power OH LLC. You could be forgiven if this flew under your radar.  

But, it is exciting in its way, and the excitement begins not with what is in the announcement, but rather what is not in this filing. One thing missing from the announcement is what, exactly, Will-Power OH LLC is. A bit of digging will tell us: it’s a subsidiary of Williams Companies, the US pipeline operator (not the F1 constructor). 

Another fact worth knowing is that the buyer of the power from the plant is something called Sidecat LLC, which we know is a subsidiary of Meta Platforms thanks to its motion to intervene in an Ohio proceeding about utility American Electric Power’s plans to create a specific data center electric tariff. 

But there is still more that we do not know from this thin announcement. For instance, why is this project known as Socrates South (are there other Socrates projects nearby)? And what equipment is being used to generate electricity from natural gas in this project? We do not know cost figures either.  

But that information exists, and Halcyon has it.

This week, we are publicly releasing the first iteration of our gas power plant tracker, which includes more than 100 natural gas-fired power plants in early stages of development in the US. Within the tracker’s data, we have more detail on this project, its technology, and its costs, and much more.  

First: the reason this plant is called Socrates South is that, yes, there is another Socrates plant. But actually, there isn’t — both plants are part of something called Project Socrates, with two separate plants (Plato North and Plato South) referred to collectively as Project Socrates. To put it another way: Socrates the philosopher had one famous pupil, Plato; Project Socrates the power asset development has two pupils, Plato North and Plato South. 

Welcome to the world of power plant naming - but also, welcome to a key fact: the plant that has just been approved is one of two, each of which will be 200 megawatts. Another 200 megawatt plant is coming under the same development plan soon. 

Second: we have some indication of what these projects will cost. A letter in support of Project Socrates from the president of the Ohio Senate states that the project will invest approximately $1.5 billion into the local economy. An economic development report for just the Plato North project (which is not yet approved) says that it will entail approximately $0.7 billion of capital investment, though some of that figure will be for non-power investment such as gas infrastructure.  

Third, we also know precisely what generation technology will be used for Plato South. Or rather, we know the technologies: in its application documents, we find a table with details on all 31 generation units being deployed onsite: 15 reciprocating engines and three models of gas turbines, with a total potential output of more than 300 megawatts, not the 200 megawatts stated in higher-level planning documents. 

Note that the total combined output here is likely to be limited to the 200 megawatts stated in the application, and no power will be exported (another fact we know from the Ohio Senate president’s letter linked above). Providing 200 megawatts of continuous power from these generation units requires much more than 200 megawatts of total generation capacity. 

There’s something else we know about this project: its modeled carbon dioxide emissions could be as high as 1.5 million tons per year. That said, this modeling (which Halcyon also has in detail) includes every unit running flat-out (8,760 hours) per year, which is impractical and also, not anticipated. 

And finally, thanks to the full set of planned gas assets that Halcyon tracks, we know that there are more assets coming in the vicinity. Licking County, Ohio also has a pair of projects under development by PowerConneX, totaling 336 megawatts, and also powering data centers.  Combined, there is a city’s worth of behind-the-meter, data-center-only power generation being built in one corner of one state.  

Nationwide, Halcyon is tracking almost 55 gigawatts of plants under development, their development timelines and milestones, and their planned capital costs. That number changes every day, and with it does our understanding of who is building what, where, at what cost, and for what purpose.  

At Halcyon, one of our core convictions is that the market-critical information that exists today is all-but-useless without the tools for proper collection, aggregation, discovery and analysis. Our gas power plant tracker is the first pass at solving that problem, and creating information that is authoritative, scalable, and (hopefully) useful. Drop us a line if you’d like access to this treasure trove yourself.

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