St. Charles Parish

The Waterford Expansion and Grid Modernization

The Waterford site in Killona has been part of St. Charles Parish for decades. Waterford 3, the nuclear plant, has operated there since 1985.¹ Residents know the site, and the parish has a long relationship with Entergy and with industrial energy infrastructure.

What's changing is the scope. Entergy is adding a new natural gas plant at Waterford — one of three new plants across Louisiana, totaling 2,200 MW of generation, approved to serve Meta's data center in Richland Parish. The Waterford expansion is expected to come online in late 2029 and will operate as baseload generation — running continuously, not just during peak demand.²

Grid Modernization

To understand what's happening at the Waterford site, you need both national and Louisiana context.

Nationally, from roughly 2005 to 2023, U.S. electricity demand was essentially flat. Efficiency gains, demand-side management, and shifts in the economy kept consumption level despite population growth. Utilities planned for stability, not surge. Infrastructure investment slowed. The grid aged. That assumption is now broken. The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — the federal government's primary research source on grid energy use — documented data centers consuming 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, roughly 4.4% of total U.S. electricity. By 2028, that figure is projected to reach 325 to 580 terawatt-hours — nearly tripling in five years. No single sector has driven demand growth of this speed and concentration in the modern history of the American grid.³

In Louisiana, the underinvestment problem was worse. For decades, Entergy resisted grid upgrades despite repeated warnings from regulators, residents, and advocates. The consequences were real: after Hurricane Ida hit in August 2021, hundreds of thousands of Entergy Louisiana customers lost power — many for weeks — because aging transmission infrastructure that had been flagged for upgrades failed. The grid wasn't just old. It had been specifically allowed to deteriorate. A ProPublica investigation documented this pattern going back to at least Hurricane Katrina in 2005.⁴

The Waterford expansion and the associated 60-mile, 500kV Mt. Olive–Sarepta transmission corridor add modern, efficient capacity to a system that genuinely needed investment — and that has failed Louisiana residents before. That infrastructure serves the entire Entergy Louisiana service area, not just Meta. A more reliable grid means fewer outages, better storm resilience, and transmission built to current standards rather than the aging lines that failed after Ida and Gustav. For a parish that has weathered Katrina, Gustav, Isaac, and Ida, that has real, practical value.

What's Different This Time

The Waterford site isn't new to St. Charles Parish. What's new is who the expansion primarily serves and what the long-term financial structure looks like. The new plant is being built to support a single corporate customer — formally Laidley, LLC, a Meta subsidiary — under a 15-year power purchase agreement, while the plant itself will operate for 30 years.⁵ The infrastructure costs, including $546M in transmission upgrades, are spread across all Entergy Louisiana ratepayers.⁶ And Meta's data center — where the jobs and direct economic activity are — is in Richland Parish, 200+ miles away. The parish gets the power plant; it doesn't get the data center.

The expansion brings construction jobs, property tax revenue, and the grid upgrades described above. But the financial terms are worth understanding, because they're structured differently from the industrial deals St. Charles Parish has seen before.

Jobs

Money

The Contract Gap

Laidley, LLC — a Meta subsidiary — holds a 15-year power purchase agreement for the plants. The plants themselves operate for 30 years. That gap already shifts significant financial risk onto ratepayers. But it gets worse: Meta sold 80% of the data center to Blue Owl Capital through a joint venture, creating a structure that allows Meta to exit after as few as four years — not fifteen.⁵

The Louisiana Public Service Commission approved Entergy's plant application on the same day Meta announced the Blue Owl restructuring, without pausing to assess whether the new arrangement still protected ratepayers. The Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists jointly filed a motion asking the PSC to require Laidley and Meta to appear as parties and explain the deal. The Commission declined.⁷

Louisiana will likely need this generation capacity regardless — grid demand is rising and existing infrastructure is aging. But the financial terms depend on whether Laidley's contract holds, whether Blue Owl maintains the data center, and whether the state ever scrutinizes what it agreed to.⁵

Water

Meta's Richland Parish facility is registered to consume 8.4 billion gallons annually. Actual usage is estimated at 500–600 million gallons per year.⁸

Rep. Danny McCormick filed House Resolution 20 (2026) urging the Department of Conservation and Energy to study data center water usage from Caddo Lake and report its findings before the 2027 session. The resolution passed the House but does not fund a study — it requests one.⁹

Environment

Noise

Data center cooling systems generate up to 90–96 dB at the source — as loud as a lawnmower. But sound drops roughly 6 dB every time you double the distance from the source (starting from about 3 feet). At 300 feet — the minimum setback in St. Charles Parish's proposed ordinance — a 96 dB source drops to approximately 57 dB. That's roughly the volume of a window AC unit. Not deafening, but constant — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.¹⁰

Loudoun County, Virginia — the nation's largest data center hub — caps facility noise at 55 dB at the property line, and the proposed St. Charles ordinance matches that limit. Even at 55 dB, Loudoun residents report persistent low-frequency hum that standard decibel readings understate. Low-frequency sound is particularly hard to block with barriers or walls and carries further than higher-pitched noise.¹¹

The Waterford site is a gas plant, not a data center, so the noise profile is different — gas turbines rather than cooling fans. But the broader point holds: industrial facilities that run 24/7 create chronic noise that affects nearby residents. The proposed ordinance's 55 dB limit and 300-foot setback are meaningful protections — if they're adopted and enforced.

What Advocacy Groups Are Saying

Public meetings, public records, organizations, and how to make your voice heard.