Nebraska hasn’t built a power plant in about twenty years. It’s building one now, and one U.S. engineer holds the entire contract.
Nebraska Public Power District broke ground on Princeton Road Station, a dual-fuel generating station near Hallam in southern Lancaster County, adjacent to the existing Sheldon Station. Burns & McDonnell of Kansas City has the engineer-procure-construct contract. ENR reported the project at $3.1 billion; NPPD’s own project page confirms capacity, location and schedule but carries no cost figure, so treat the number as ENR’s.
Two technologies, one balance of plant
Nameplate capacity is 694 MW, split between 478 MW of dual-fuel combustion turbines and 216 MW of dual-fuel reciprocating internal combustion engines. Equipment is two Siemens F-class combustion turbines and 12 Wartsila reciprocating engines. Natural gas is primary, diesel is backup.
The engineering problem is the split. Burns & McDonnell is designing centralized balance-of-plant facilities to process, store and distribute fuel oil, urea and water across two different generation technologies with different consumption profiles, and sizing that infrastructure for a future expansion that hasn’t been committed.
“These units are extremely flexible and strengthen our diverse generation mix,” said Tom Kent, president and CEO of NPPD. Ryan Carlson, the Burns & McDonnell EPC project manager, described the balance-of-plant facilities as “designed to simultaneously serve two different generation technologies and be scalable to support the potential future expansion of Princeton Road Station.”
In service is 2029. The plant will carry about 32 permanent employees, and NPPD estimates the capacity could serve roughly 318,000 residential homes at maximum output.
The load behind it, and the politics around it
Nebraska hosts roughly 36 data centers, and about 11.5 percent of the state’s electricity already goes to them. That’s the second-highest share in the country. A public power district committing to 694 MW of dispatchable generation is a direct answer to that load curve.
Except the state is simultaneously trying to slow the thing driving it. Governor Jim Pillen signed an executive order on July 21, 2026 pausing data-center access to ImagiNE Nebraska Act tax incentives. So the utility is building ahead of demand that political leadership has started to question, on a 2029 schedule that can’t easily be unwound.
Why single-source EPC matters here
Handing the whole engineer-procure-construct package to one firm on a project this size concentrates schedule risk in a way owners usually avoid. It also removes the interface disputes that eat generation projects alive, particularly where two dissimilar prime-mover technologies share fuel, water and chemical systems. NPPD chose fewer seams over more competition.
The generation build-out isn’t limited to new gas. Retired nuclear capacity is being brought back for the same reason, including the Duane Arnold Energy Center restart in Iowa, where Google has contracted for most of the output before the unit is even relicensed.