By Stephen Smoot
A number of entities represented at the West Virginia Energy Summit provided updates and descriptions of work over the past year and plans for the future.
Three of these, First Energy, American Electric Power, and Dominion, shared their status.
American Electric Power serves the western tier of counties in West Virginia, including the Charleston and Huntington area. One of the largest coal-fired power plants in the world, the John Amos plant near Charleston, among two others, will receive upgrades to keep those operations “in compliance with EPA regulations.”
Since the Obama Administration, coal-fired plants have seen increasing regulation of operations that have made them increasingly costly to run. AEP, however, adds the explanation that they are “rebuilding aging infrastructure to strengthen reliability throughout several West Virginia counties.”
First Energy’s update included signing on to Governor Patrick Morrisey’s “50 by 50” plan to boost state energy generation capacity from 15 to 50 gigawatts by 2050. Their representative stated that “West Virginia is perfectly positioned to become America’s energy powerhouse.”
They shared their priorities, which included a short list of priorities. These priorities are expected to guide “transformations” undertaken in the effort to support expanding capacity.
They include: “large connected loads”, “resource adequacy/energy security”, “generation capacity”, “transmission capacity”, and “customer affordability.”
First Energy also shared that they put $1.4 billion into its Mountain State operations from 2022 to 24 and will invest $3.5 billion more in the next several years. Much of that will go to new power plants.
Dominion Energy has a much larger footprint in Virginia, but also operates the Mount Storm power plant in Grant County. Its service area runs along the Potomac Valley in Virginia, the southeast portion of the Old Dominion, and counties in the area of Elizabeth City in North Carolina.
“Virginia is the largest data center market in the world,” shared Dominion’s presentation. Northern Virginia, particularly Ashburn, serves as a center of development. Virginia, however, passed restrictions several years ago on expanding generation and transmission capacity, making West Virginia the most convenient source to serve added needs.
Their “local growth forecast” indicated that peak demand will rise from 23,000 MW in 2025 to 43,000 MW in 2034 and have pegged that number as their expansion target. Dominion operations also support those of a significant percentage of federal government operations, including the United States most important defense facilities such as the naval base at Norfolk and the Pentagon itself.
Dominion explained that their expansion plans will include 17,534 MW from solar, 3,460 from wind, 2,000 from battery storage, 1,944 from nuclear, and 9,454 from natural gas. They indicated no plans to expand coal capacity.
In September of 2024, Mark Bayliss of the West Virginia Broadband co-op and also with the Federal Communications Commission, laid out the need for both expanded power and data centers to stay ahead of the strategic goals of Communist China.
The Pendleton Times reported at the time Bayliss told attendees that “keeping the United States ahead in data center operations is absolutely critical.” As long as the United States can keep generating enough energy to stay ahead of data center and other needs, it can remain comfortably ahead of efforts by Red China and its allies, including Russia, to exceed American efforts.
Governor Morrisey’s energy expansion plans include adding value to what the state produces. During the Industrial Revolution and after, West Virginia played a primarily “upstream” role in that it extracted commodities such as coal or timber and sent them out of state for processing that added value. Locating data centers in state helps to put West Virginia in mid and downstream applications for raw materials extracted here.
Weirton hosts a business that adds value to West Virginia generated power while also serving the needs of data centers and other modern businesses in a different fashion.
Form Energy has three facilities in Somerville, Massachusetts, Bay Area, California, and Weirton, West Virginia. The eight-year old company employs 450 in its Weirton facility, almost half of its total employee base, to “create low-cost, multi-day energy storage capable of providing cost-effect firm capacity to the electric grid around the globe.”
“Multi-day iron batteries” produced there “can store and discharge energy for 100 hours.”
According to Form, “unlike lithium-ion batteries, which can only provide energy for a few hours at a time due to their relatively high costs, iron air batteries can deliver energy for multiple days at a time.”
The website goes on to speculate that “achieving Form Energy’s cost and performance targets will unlock tens of gigawatts of demand for multi-day storage.” Production of the batteries also uses materials commonly found in the United States, not requiring trade with foreign adversaries to acquire materials.
PBS’ Nova program focused on Form Energy’s Weirton plant in 2023. It explained the technology originally developed by NASA. From an article based on the program, “Humans have known for millennia that when water, oxygen, and iron mix, they create rust.” It goes on to state that “we’ve learned more recently that that reaction also releases energy. Iron-air batteries capture that energy and turn it into an electric current – then recharge it by reversing the reaction ‘unrusting’ the iron.
Data centers utilize huge banks of batteries as part of their operations to ensure that when the grid experiences issues, they do not. A decade ago they best resembled very large automobile batteries, but the technology has advanced since then.
Additionally, mining for lithium is an extensive operation in terms of steps needed to extract lithium from groundwater and also to process it for use. The environmental impact of that process detracts somewhat from the “green” credentials of their chief users, including electric powered vehicles.
The Energy Information Administration of the United States Government also stated early last year that “China dominates global trade of battery minerals,” meaning that reliance on lithium batteries is tantamount to reliance on Communist China, America’s most powerful foreign adversary.
But Form Energy’s use of Appalachian iron and other resources means that Americans benefit and not America’s enemies.
