This new, $750M power plant in Iberville Parish promises to be the state’s most efficient
Louisiana’s newest power plant is coming online in Iberville Parish and is expected to generate enough electricity to run more than 500,000 homes each year.
New Jersey-based Kindle Energy unveiled its $750 million electric generation plant on Thursday, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring local leaders, energy executives, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy James P. Danley.
Magnolia Power Station sits a few miles southeast of Plaquemine off River Road. Described by officials as state-of-the-art, it has begun generating roughly 700 megawatts of electricity, most of which will supply power to rural Louisiana homes for the next 20 years.
Those homes are served by five rural utility cooperatives that make up the 1803 Electric Cooperative: Beauregard Electric Cooperative; Claiborne Electric Cooperative; Northeast Louisiana Power Cooperative; South Louisiana Electric Cooperative Association; and Washington-St. Tammany Electric Cooperative Inc.
Kindle Energy Senior Vice President John Baylor said that the plant’s combined-cycle gas turbines generate electricity in two stages: burning natural gas to spin a turbine, then capturing the exhaust heat to produce steam that drives a second turbine — converting nearly twice as much energy as a conventional plant extracts from the same fuel.
“It’s more expensive to build it this way, but you use a lot less gas per kilowatt of energy,” Baylor said. “This is the most efficient power plant in Louisiana today.”
Baylor added that the facility was also designed to run on hydrogen and to accommodate carbon-capture technology down the road, depending on “wherever the politics go.” He described the plant as a 40-year asset.
“Our design of the location, our design of the plant, are to make it as sustainable as we can make it for the long term,” he said.
Nearly a decade in the making, the Blackstone-backed project broke ground in 2022, creating 400 construction jobs. Kindle CEO Lee Davis said the plant will support 25 jobs, with average salaries and benefits ranging from $150,000 to $175,000.
“When companies like Kindle invest here, it sends a strong message that Iberville is open for business,” said Parish President Chris Daigle.
Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis said that most of the rural cooperatives involved previously held power purchase agreements with subsidiaries of Cleco and Entergy. That changed in 2022, when the Public Service Commission approved a $1.5 billion plan allowing rural cooperatives to purchase power from out-of-state utilities over the next 20 years. As part of the deal, Kindle Energy agreed to build the Magnolia Power Station in order to supply the cooperatives.
“Us doing that incentivizes more developers,” Lewis said, referring to companies like Kindle.
He added that, on average, the arrangement will cut energy costs for the cooperatives by 15%, savings he expects to be passed on to rural ratepayers.
Deputy Secretary Danley hailed the project as aligned with the Trump Administration’s goals of ensuring affordability for ratepayers as electricity demand rises across the country, driven by “industry, on-shoring manufacturing and data center demand.”
“It is projects like these that are the very basis of the policy of the Trump administration,” Danley said.
He also criticized what he described as regulatory overreach under the Biden Administration that slowed power generation projects.
“The objective is to get out of the way, so the economics of power demand are met by developers who build generators like this,” he added.