The Ohio Power Siting Board on June 26 approved construction of a 250 MW natural gas plant in Licking County that will serve a single customer: a data center owned by Sidecat LLC, an affiliate of Meta Platforms. The Socrates the Younger Power Generation Facility will operate behind the meter and will not be physically connected to the electric grid, the board said.
It is the third behind-the-meter plant that Williams subsidiary Will-Power OH has brought forward for Meta in New Albany, after the 200 MW Socrates South and Socrates North sites. Together the three facilities add up to 650 MW of gas-fired capacity dedicated to one company's computing campus, all of it outside the regulated utility system.
What was approved
Will-Power OH will build and operate the new plant on 109 acres at the southwest corner of Clover Valley Road and Harrison Road NW in New Albany. The project includes 116 MW of battery storage to handle fluctuations in demand and to cover unplanned outages, according to the board. The developer must comply with 36 conditions designed to limit impacts during construction and operation. The case is docketed as 26-0169-EL-BLN.
The footprint is much larger than before. The STY site covers 109 acres, while Williams describes each of the two Socrates sites as spanning roughly 20 acres. At 250 MW plus 116 MW of storage, it is also the largest of the three plants, and the first whose approval included storage from the start.
The battery component is the main design change from the original Socrates applications, and Williams has since filed battery storage amendments for both Socrates sites as well. A data center running on an island has no grid to lean on when a turbine trips, so storage serves as the immediate backup that a utility connection would normally provide.
How the first plants were set up
The template was set a year earlier. On June 9, 2025, the siting board authorized the 200 MW Socrates South plant, which it said would serve the load of an adjacent data center and "will not be physically connected to the electric power grid." Sidecat owns a 740-acre campus in the New Albany Business Park and had already built several data centers there, with its latest under construction next to the plant site. Gas would come from two 24-inch pipelines to be permitted separately.
Data Center Dynamics reported at the time that the full two-site build, Socrates South and North, was expected to cost about $1.6 billion. Williams' project materials describe the two sites as roughly 20 acres each, with a combined 400 MW and target in-service dates in the third and fourth quarters of 2026.
The equipment list shows how these plants differ from a utility combined-cycle station. Power Engineering reported that the design uses Solar Turbines Titan 250 and PGM 130 units, Siemens Energy SGT400 turbines and Caterpillar 3520 engines. Many smaller machines, rather than a few large ones, let the plant keep running when individual units are down for maintenance or fail.
Williams' bet on power
For Williams, which says it handles about a third of the natural gas used in the United States each day, the Socrates projects are a move from moving gas to selling electricity. In November 2025 the company said it had $5.1 billion committed to modular gas-fired or hybrid plants aimed at data center and industrial loads in areas where grid capacity is falling behind demand, Power Engineering reported. The Socrates plants operate under a ten-year power purchase agreement.
Williams' project page now lists further facilities beyond the original pair, including the STY plant and another named Neo, as well as a pipeline project named Aristotle South.
Why off-grid
The appeal for Meta is speed and certainty. A behind-the-meter plant needs a state siting approval and a gas supply, not a place in a utility's interconnection queue or a new transmission line. Williams' fact sheet pitches the arrangement as one that supports reliability "without impacting utility customers," since the plant and its costs sit outside the rate base.
That pitch has gained weight in Ohio. AEP Ohio's data center tariff, approved by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio on July 9, 2025, requires new data centers larger than 25 MW to pay a minimum monthly bill based on at least 85% of contracted demand for up to 12 years, according to Utility Dive. The order also told AEP Ohio to lift its moratorium on connecting new data centers. An island plant sidesteps both the minimum bill and any wait for utility service.
It also changes who carries the risk if demand forecasts prove wrong. Under a utility tariff, a data center that leaves early still owes its minimum bill, which protects other ratepayers. Under a private power purchase agreement, that exposure sits with the developer and the plant owner. For Meta and Williams, the ten-year contract defines the obligation, and the utility's other customers are not on the hook if the campus scales back.
The tradeoffs are real. A data center on its own gas plant carries all the fuel price risk and must maintain enough spare capacity and storage to ride through outages without help from the grid. And the generation built for it adds nothing to the supply available to other customers in PJM, even though it burns gas from the same pipelines that serve the region's utility plants.
What to watch
The first test is whether Socrates South and North reach service on schedule in the second half of 2026. Their performance will show whether an off-grid campus of this size can match the reliability that data center operators normally get from a utility connection plus backup generators.
The second is how far the model spreads. Williams has said its power business is targeting regions where the grid is lagging, and other gas pipeline companies are watching the same opportunity. Ohio's siting board has now shown that it will approve these plants with conditions, which makes New Albany the clearest case study in the country for powering AI campuses outside the utility system.