Second Lordstown Energy Plant to Be Announced Today

LORDSTOWN, Ohio – Officials will formally announce plans for the construction of a second electrical generation plant along Henn Parkway during a ceremony this afternoon.

“It’s a bigger investment than the first one,” Guy Coviello, vice president of government affairs at the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber, said Tuesday. “It’s rare for a community to have one $1 billion investment. To have it happen twice in two years is a real boost to our local economy.”

The Business Journal first reported last February that the company constructing the first plant – Clean Energy Future LLC — planned to build a second plant similar to the Lordstown Energy Center.

Officials broke ground last April on the Lordstown Energy project. The energy plant should employ more than 500 construction workers during the construction phase.

That project came with a price tag of about $890 million. The new energy center should cost more than $1 billion, Coviello says.

Coviello says the new plant – named the Trumbull Energy Center – would be built next to the Lordstown Energy plant on Henn Parkway, just off state Route 45, and require a similar amount of manpower at the site.

“There should be hundreds of construction workers,” he said. “It should be very similar to the first one.”

The Lordstown Energy Center is scheduled for completion by the summer of 2018, Coviello said. As that plant is ramping up, construction would begin on the second electrical generation plant.

Clean Energy Future announced last spring that it would move forward with the Lordstown Energy project – a 940-megawatt energy plant capable of providing electricity to 800,000 households. The plant is fueled by natural gas, and officials have said Lordstown proved an ideal site because of its location to power lines and natural gas deposits in the Utica and Marcellus shale plays.

Such plants are necessary because power companies are retiring older, less efficient coal-burning plants and replacing them with ones fueled by natural gas.

The Trumbull Energy Center is projected to be the same size and scope as the Lordstown Center. “It’s a good indicator of what’s happened with the resurgence in the shale industry,” Coviello said.

Mayor Arno Hill said some additional work is required before a second plant could get underway, and issues such as state or local incentives have yet to be discussed.

“I think it’s coming,” he said. “We still have to work out a lot of details, but it’s great for the community and the Valley.”

Pictured: Rendering of Lordstown Energy Center under construction in Lordstown.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.