On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced a major redevelopment of the Kentucky Paducah, KY Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The development is expected to bring thousands of jobs to this district of western Kentucky and has the potential to lower electricity rates for people living in the area.
Secretary Wright announced the move during an appearance on the Fox News morning show, Fox & Friends.
.@SecretaryWright announces a redevelopment of @ENERGY's Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky:
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 29, 2026
"There will be a lot of new natural gas power plants, a large data center, thousands of jobs, and tens of billions of dollars of investment in rural Western Kentucky." 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/BbmBV6s5Mp
The Secretary said:
So, the big announcement this morning is about the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, used to enrich uranium right after World War II to build our original arsenal, and then that facility was decommissioned over a decade ago. But we're announcing today a redevelopment of that site, there will be a lot of new natural gas power plants, a large data center, thousands of jobs, and tens of billions of dollars of investment in rural western Kentucky.
The Department of Energy has formed a partnership with several energy companies, according to the press release. The development will be funded by the private sector.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced a landmark partnership with Brookfield, NextEra Energy, Big Rivers Electric Power Corporation, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative, and Paducah Power System to redevelop portions of DOE’s Paducah Site into a data center campus accompanied by new affordable energy infrastructure. The more than $100 billion privately funded investment, one of the largest in Kentucky’s history, is expected to create approximately 8,000 construction jobs and 600 permanent jobs.
Consistent with President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, the project’s generation and storage capacity would exceed the campus’s energy needs, allowing excess electricity to be delivered to the regional grid, helping reduce energy costs for American families and businesses. At or near the Paducah campus, NextEra Energy plans to develop 2 gigawatts (GW) of new grid-connected natural gas-fired generation, upgrade existing transmission infrastructure, and deploy up to 2.6 GW of battery energy storage to support a new 1.8 GW artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) innovation campus.
Nuclear would be preferable, but natural gas is better than the various "renewable" schemes pushed by the left.
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This is an interesting look at government-private sector cooperation, and there's a certain amount of sense to it; the Paducah facility, as noted, was sitting idle, having been decommissioned. Now a facility originally used to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons will be converted to peaceful purposes, and the private sector will be picking up the tab. An increase in grid-level electrical generation may be expected to lower rates in western Kentucky, as well, and the data center will bring high-tech, good-paying jobs with it. The facility is expected to go live in five years, in 2031.
Data centers, in fact, NIMBYism aside, are the coming thing. Love them or hate them, we'll be seeing more of these facilities that are essentially giant server farms. The advent and increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) requires them, and AI is some toothpaste that ain't going back in the tube.
So, an idle federal facility will be put to good use, and the energy companies doing the development will be paying for it, in the expectation of turning a profit. Sounds like a win-win.
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