UNIONTOWN, Pennsylvania — Scott Dunn did not get a call from Washington. Instead, he received calls from his constituents.

The chairman of the Fayette County Board of Commissioners had watched the March announcement like everyone else: a $17 billion natural gas generation hub somewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania, with 4.3 gigawatts of capacity, financed through Japan’s investment commitment under the U.S.-Japan trade agreement, with NextEra Energy Resources as developer. 

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The federal government called it Project South Mon. It would not say where. Dunn did the arithmetic anyone from Dunbar would do.

“It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out, OK, the Monongahela is only so big and south of Pittsburgh, and that could be us,” he said. “Why couldn’t it be us?”

“I actually started hearing from property owners, and they were like, ‘Hey, we’re being contacted. What should I do?'” Dunn said. “So the first thing I said was, ‘Get an attorney.’”

Dunn had a name for the thing before anyone in Washington would put one on it. “I said, ‘I call it the Trump Power Plant,” Dunn said. “And they were like, ‘OK.'” Then he asked the question that may have decided the whole thing.

“‘Do you want to sell your property? And is this life-changing money for you?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, this is life-changing money.’ So I said, ‘Whatever deadline they put in front of you, meet that deadline, because they’re going to go wherever they have the easiest path.’”

They met the deadlines. It is coming here.

The project is the East Riverside Energy Center, and it will sit in Luzerne Township on the Fayette County bank of the Monongahela River.

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A NextEra development executive, speaking on background, laid out the plan in detail: the company holds purchase options on roughly 700 contiguous acres along the river. About 150 of those acres would carry the plant itself: three combined-cycle power blocks, each in a two-on-one configuration — two gas turbines feeding a single steam turbine — at roughly 1,250 megawatts apiece. Commercial operation is targeted phase-by-phase in 2030, 2031, and 2032, with all of it interconnected to the PJM Interconnection regional grid.

Of the $17 billion allocated to Pennsylvania, the executive........

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