PPL Corp.’s electric utilities continue to sign agreements with potential data centers and other large load customers in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, company officials said during an earnings conference call on Friday.
At the same time, a PPL-Blackstone Infrastructure joint venture is in talks with hyperscalers to supply their data centers with generation, including options that could be built within several years, according to Vincent Sorgi, PPL president and CEO.
PPL Electric Utility in Pennsylvania is continuing to see rapid growth in data center interconnection requests, according to Sorgi.
The company expects at least 10 GW to be under electric supply agreements by the end of the first quarter, Sorgi told equity analysts on the conference call.
“That said, we believe all of the 25.2 gigawatts of projects have a high probability of completion,” he said.
In Kentucky, PPL’s Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities subsidiaries have an 8 GW data center pipeline, with about half of it considered “highly active,” according to Sorgi. They also have about 1.1 GW of advanced manufacturing and other non-data center interconnection requests, up about 150 MW from the third quarter, he said.
Data center customers face increasing pressure to secure new, dedicated power supplies, and PPL’s joint venture with Blackstone aims to fill that need, according to Sorgi.
The JV has executed contracts for several land parcels where power plants could be built and is securing natural gas capacity, Sorgi said. It is also offering alternative generation solutions that come online more quickly than the roughly five years needed to build a combined cycle power plant, he said.
“These are technologies that we could get online more in kind of the '28, '29 time frame versus, call it … '31, '32, like what we're seeing with the larger CCGTs,” he said.
The PPL-Blacksone JV hasn’t secured gas turbines from GE, Siemens or Mitsubishi, according to Sorgi.
“While we have not formally locked in any reservation agreements with either of the three parties, we are very actively engaged with all three and actually feel pretty good about our ability to get turbines from either or all of those to meet the needs of the data centers,” Sorgi said.
If the PJM Interconnection adopts a reliability backstop procurement mechanism, it would likely acquire 6 GW to 7 GW, according to PPL estimates, Sorgi said.
“This, however, wouldn't address the expected data center demand in PPL Electric’s service territory, let alone data center demand across all of PJM,” Sorgi said. “What the auction does signal, however, is increase pressure on data centers to bring their own generation to market or at least pay for the new generation required to power their data centers.”
PPL increased its four-year capital expenditure plan by about $3 billion to $23 billion. Besides increased transmission spending, PPL expects its utilities will spend an additional $500 million in Kentucky and $300 million in Pennsylvania on system hardening and smart grid deployment, the Allentown, Pennsylvania-based utility company said in an investor presentation.
In part, the spending plan is in response to more frequent and severe storms as well as more extreme weather events, Sorgi said.
Like other utilities, PPL is focused on reining in operations and maintenance expenses in an effort to keep customer rates as low as possible, according to Sorgi.
PPL has achieved about $170 million in run rate O&M savings from its 2021 baseline, about a year ahead of our $175 million target for the end of 2026, Sorgi said. PPL expects its O&M expenses will grow about 1% a year.
“We expect additional structural savings as we continue to harden the grid and deploy smart grid technologies and improve overall system efficiency,” Sorgi said. “We also see AI as an incremental but meaningful driver of efficiency across customer service, grid operations and back-office functions.”
Despite a 2.9% drop in weather-normalized industrial sales in Pennsylvania last year, overall weather-normalized sales in the state increased by 0.5% to about 37,100 GWh in 2025 from the year before, PPL said in the presentation.
Weather-normalized sales in Kentucky increased 0.1% last year to about 29,600 GWh.
PPL’s utilities have about 3.6 million customers in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
