American Electric Power is building a power plant far from its own wires. The utility said on 14 October that it plans to invest about $4 billion in a 702 MW fuel cell plant near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and sell its output to Google under a 20-year power purchase agreement. The project company, Cheyenne Fuel Cell LLC, is about 92 % owned and controlled by AEP; funds advised by Basalt Infrastructure Partners hold nearly 8 %. Construction is to start this year and full operation is expected by the end of 2028.
Natural Gas Without A Flame
The units come from Bloom Energy. Its fuel cells turn natural gas into electricity electrochemically instead of burning it, and AEP says carbon capture technology is to be added as the project matures, with near-zero-emissions power as the goal. AEP describes the technology as quick to deploy and able to give large-load customers reliable power on demand. Chairman and chief executive Bill Fehrman presented the project as a new way of meeting customers' needs both inside and beyond AEP's traditional service territory. Here the utility acts as owner and generator for one customer, not as the local grid.
The link with Bloom is older. In November 2024 AEP agreed to buy up to 1 GW of Bloom's solid oxide fuel cells over roughly a decade, starting with a 100 MW order, to serve data center growth in central Ohio at sites where the grid could not deliver full power in time, EnergyTech reported then. AEP counted about 15 GW of data center load commitments for this decade at that point. The new release does not say whether the Cheyenne units come under that agreement.
Cheyenne's Second Power Deal In Two Weeks
AEP says the project follows the agreements between Google and Black Hills Corp. that took effect on 30 September. Under those, Black Hills is to serve Google's planned Cheyenne data center with a 2.7 GW package that includes 564 MW of its own new gas generation and about 2.1 GW of resources contracted from third parties and run through a private microgrid. Neither AEP's release nor Power Technology's report says whether the 702 MW is part of that third-party share.
Many Small Units, One Customer
A fuel cell plant of this size is not one big machine but a field of modular units, each with its own gas feed, power electronics and heat to get rid of. The questions for the people who will run it differ from those of an engine or turbine plant: how output and efficiency drift as the stacks age, how modules are exchanged without taking capacity away from a load that never stops, and how the whole field behaves through Cheyenne's cold winters and its high-altitude summers. The gas supply for a continuous 702 MW also has to be in place before the end of 2028.
Fuel cells keep turning up as an answer to the same problem as gas engines: firm power next to a data center sooner than the grid can bring it. The supply chain is moving with them: this week LS Electric and LS Materials booked orders for equipment that goes with Bloom fuel cell power at U.S. data centers. What has not been published is whether the Cheyenne campus will still keep engine generators for backup behind all this. For a power plant built for a single customer, that is the next detail worth asking about.
Sources: AEP (PR Newswire), AEP, Power Technology, EnergyTech (2024)
