A data center operator in Oklahoma City is building its own 100 MW natural gas power plant and will not connect to the electricity grid at all. StateImpact Oklahoma, reporting for KGOU on 6 October, says Scale Datacenters is putting the plant on the former Chesapeake Energy campus in the city, behind the meter.
The unusual part is where the machines come from. To get round the waiting times for new equipment, the company is importing used generators from decommissioned power plants in Bulgaria. Its chief executive, Trevor Francis, told the station that the facility is designed to blend into the city so that people would never know it was there.
Permits And The State Law Behind It
Scale Datacenters submitted its air quality permit applications to the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality in September, and the department is carrying out its technical review. An off-grid plant of this kind is possible under Senate Bill 480, passed in 2025. The company, founded about two years ago, reports 450 employees and is also building a facility in southeast Oklahoma.
Second-Hand Engines, New Climate
Buying generating sets from closed plants abroad is a direct answer to the lead times that new engines and turbines carry at the moment. It also moves equipment from one climate to another. The cooling systems that came with those units were chosen for a different site, a different layout and different summers. Whether they hold the full output through an Oklahoma heatwave, and how they behave when several units stand close together in a dense urban plot, has to be worked out again for the new location.
The same goes for emissions and noise. The units were permitted under European rules; in Oklahoma City they need a state air permit, and a plant meant to be invisible in a city also has to be quiet. None of this is unusual for a relocation, but it is engineering work that does not show in the purchase price of used equipment.
The project is a small one next to the gigawatt campuses announced elsewhere this year. It shows, though, how far operators will go to get power generation running quickly when the grid cannot deliver in time.
Sources: KGOU / StateImpact Oklahoma
