PA MAGA Country Doesn't Want Trump's Data Center 'Golden Goose'

At 9:59 a.m., Monday, President Trump posted on Truth Social that communities refusing data centers “want to end up being backwards and poor,” told the country to “let Data Reign,” and warned that killing “the Golden Goose” would leave them nobody else to blame. At 6 p.m. the same day, at least 200 people packed the Hanover Volunteer Fire Department hall in Burgettstown for a three-hour hearing on a seven-building, 1.7 million-square-foot data center campus that Prime Data Centers of Dallas wants to build on 126 acres of reclaimed strip mine at Starpointe Business Park, along with its own 450-megawatt gas-fired power plant.

The county’s 2,148 unconventional wells, the most in the state, produced 1.15 trillion cubic feet of gas last year and generated $7.8 million in impact fees, the largest payment in Pennsylvania, though retail electricity prices have risen anyway. The reason for this is the capacity market run by PJM Interconnection, the power grid operator for Pennsylvania and 12 other states, which pays generators to stand by for peak demand and passes the cost to every customer on the system.

PJM’s July auction for 2028 and 2029 cleared at $325 per megawatt-day, the maximum under a price cap the Shapiro administration negotiated after the 2024 auction set a record at $269.92, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported. Even at the cap, the auction fell 6,831 megawatts short of PJM's reliability target, a wider deficit than a year earlier. PJM's peak-demand forecast has grown by 66,000 megawatts through 2036 on retiring plants, electrification and proposed data centers like the one in Burgettstown – an amount that is close to 80 times the output of Three Mile Island, which reopens next year to serve data centers exclusively.

“These are flat prices that are going to remain high,” Cicero told the Capital-Star in July. The cap was extended at the request of the PJM-state governors and the Trump administration to cover the July auction and one in December for 2030 and 2031, and no cap has been set for the auctions after that.

Hanover Township adopted its data center ordinance in March, two months before Prime Data Centers filed its application in May. South Strabane Township supervisors adopted their own rules unanimously in June after six months of packed meetings, setting a 1,500-foot setback from homes, a 125% decommissioning bond and a $25 million insurance requirement, with no project on the table. Cecil Township supervisors have been drafting their own ordinance since April.

The first Hanover hearing, on August 5, drew more than 200 residents and went on for so long that Prime’s planned presentation didn’t even take place. Supervisors granted party status to about three dozen residents, giving them the right to cross-examine witnesses and to appeal, and John Smith, an attorney representing several of them, argued that the township's zoning hearing board must classify the use before the supervisors can act on a conditional use permit, a jurisdictional question that pushed the hearing to August 31.

Before Monday’s session, Prime asked Alex Paris Contracting to help fill the hall with supporters, according to a letter obtained by WPXI. Emanuel Paris, the company's vice president, whose relatives co-own Altian Development, the owner of the Starpointe land, told the station that “we see a really great opportunity for local jobs to be created and long-lasting local jobs from the construction side.” Township solicitor Dennis Makel scheduled four more hearing dates, on September 21, 24, 29 and 30.

Shapiro’s Executive Order 2026-05 directs the Department of Environmental Protection to review data center permits only when a developer has signed a legally binding commitment to the governor's GRID standards and has secured local approval. The order removes data centers from the state's fast-track permitting program and bars nondisclosure agreements on the projects. Shapiro said more than 100 proposals were under discussion in Pennsylvania, most of them speculative, and described some developers as “predatory” and “running roughshod” over local communities. “My word to developers is you better follow these requirements,” he said. “Otherwise you shouldn’t plan to do business here.”

The GRID standards, which passed the state House with bipartisan support and stalled in the Senate, require developers to bring their own generation, the arrangement Prime proposed in May, three months before Shapiro signed the order. A behind-the-meter plant keeps a project out of the PJM capacity auction and leaves the capacity price charged to neighboring households untouched, though this is also capacity sequestered from an ailing grid struggling to meet ratepayer demand. For example, a 450-megawatt plant could power up to 360,000 homes, according to WESA.

The public is beginning to sense that these arrangements are unfair and aren’t yet seeing many downstream benefits, like job creation and the resulting cost of living relief. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey of 1,320 adults conducted June 16 to July 19 found that 61% of Americans oppose a new data center in their area, up from 49% in March, and that 54% of Republicans are opposed. Support fell to 14% from 21% over the same four months.

I grew up in Scenery Hill and my extended family lives in Bentleyville and Ellsworth, about 20 minutes from Starpointe. Most of these folks voted for Trump. They’ve heard a version of the president's pitch from coal companies that employed our fathers and grandparents, then from the gas companies that came through with signing bonuses and royalty checks two decades ago for the modestly-performing wells that went up on our family farm. Even the Starpointe park went up in 2004 on ground the coal mines had abandoned.

As far as I know, none of my cousins is expecting to land a job at Starpointe. All of them, however, have seen their electric bills increase because data center demand across PJM's 13 states drove two straight capacity auctions right to the price cap — this at a time when every extra price shock further upends their lives, gas wells or no gas wells. A data center powered by its own off-grid gas supply, staffed by about as many personnel as a haunted house, will not release excess capacity into the grid or reduce their skyrocketing bills. Trump’s post said there are plenty of other places that want the “Golden Goose” data centers; Bentleyville residents would surely settle for a slightly cheaper chicken in each pot. 

That said, the fight isn’t over yet, and progress is hard to stop – Hanover Township’s supervisors reconvene at the fire hall on September 21. If Prime doesn’t build there, they’ll find another area that’s hungry for their construction dollars and less concerned about the long-term consequences. 

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.