Your town

Petersburg

Petersburg hosts the plant, the batteries, the solar farms, and now the pitch for data centers. The people who live here should be the first ones asked about any of it, not the last.

The data center question will be answered in Petersburg's name

In September 2025 the county commissioners passed a resolution welcoming data center development, and said at public meetings that they did it without knowing much about data centers. By June 2026 more than a hundred of your neighbors packed a commissioners meeting to ask the questions the resolution skipped. An 8,000 acre megasite around the Petersburg interchange is already marketing itself to developers, and Pike County has no zoning ordinance, which means little legal authority to shape what gets built or where.

Whatever the county decides, Petersburg lives closest to the outcome. I want the questions answered in public before the deals are signed in private: how much water, whose power bills, and what happens to the land.

What I'm hearing in Petersburg

I'm listening

Ending coal at the plant

The plant's last two coal units are being converted to natural gas: Unit 3 went offline for conversion in February 2026 and Unit 4 was scheduled to follow in June 2026, with coal at Petersburg ending entirely in 2026. A 200 megawatt battery installation has been in service since March 2025, and the Petersburg Energy Center added 250 megawatts of solar with storage in February 2026. The school district has already lost about $300,000 as plant assets shifted.

Plant families, miners, and Pike Central parents live this transition every day. Tell me what you are seeing before I tell anyone what the state should do about it.

Where I stand

The ash stays unless someone deals with it

The ash ponds at the plant rank among the worst in the country for coal ash groundwater contamination, with cobalt and other metals far above protection standards. Converting the plant to gas does not clean up the ash that is already in the ground. Protecting the White River and the wells around it is not a partisan idea. It is basic maintenance of the place we live, and I will treat it that way.

Where I stand

Three utilities, one town's bills

Duke serves Petersburg itself, CenterPoint serves much of the county, and WIN Energy REMC serves the countryside. CenterPoint customers absorbed the second phase of a roughly 20 percent increase in March 2026. The town that hosts the plant, the batteries, and the solar farms should not be an afterthought on rates. Any data center that comes here should cover more than its full cost of power, so bills around it go down, not up.

What am I missing?

If you work at the plant, live near the ash ponds, or farm ground the megasite maps touch, you are the person this page is for. Tell me what Petersburg needs before anyone else signs it up for something.

Tell me what I'm missing Meet me in person

Page last updated July 18, 2026.