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Data centers drive huge power plant buildout in Ameren Missouri 20-year plan. St. Louis Public Radio | By Kate Grumke Published Sept. 30, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. CDT Updated Sept. 30, 2026 at 9:51 a.m. CDT Ameren Missouri wants to significantly ramp up power plant construction to meet data center electricity needs, according to a 20-year plan released this week. The new plan significantly increases the company's reliance on natural gas plants while scaling back the percentage of energy produced by renewable sources like wind and solar. And in a change from previous plans, the company is no longer discussing a goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions. Monopoly utilities publish these plans, called Integrated Resource Plans, every three years as required by Missouri law. This plan is now a case before the Missouri Public Service Commission, which will include pushback from outside parties and public comment submitted to regulators before being finalized. Data center growth. There are currently 40 potential large data centers that could be built within Ameren Missouri's footprint, according to the document, including multiple projects that have signed binding agreements with the company. New data centers represent the majority of the company's projected growth over the next 20 years, said Ajay Arora, executive vice president, chief growth officer and chief generation development officer for Ameren Missouri. He said those projects could benefit regular consumers. "Economic development is vital to the state," Arora said. "It helps us modernize our electric grid to ensure reliability for everybody and have that fixed cost be spread over new customers." To meet that new demand, Ameren is planning to build power plants and renewable energy projects that would generate almost double the amount of electricity it was projecting to build in its 2023 projection. Shifting climate goals. In 2020 and 2023, Ameren focused its planning on renewable energy, discussing goals to reach net-zero carbon emissions. Ameren removed that language in the 2026 Integrated Resource Plan, discussing how its plan will decrease carbon emissions, but saying technology like carbon capture would have to advance to achieve net-zero emissions. "We are not changing our net-zero targets right now," Arora said. "However, we do outline in the plan that new technology would need to mature in order for us to achieve our net-zero goals." Much of the new power would come from natural gas - in 2023, the Integrated Resource Plan called for two such plants. In 2026, the new plan lists nine plants to be built over the next two decades. Environmental advocates took issue with that new focus on natural gas, including Jenn DeRose, the Sierra Club's campaign organizing strategist for Beyond Coal in Missouri. "Their own research shows that solar and wind are the cheapest forms of energy to build, and they're still choosing gas," DeRose said. "I find that very interesting. I also find it very interesting that they cite extreme weather as a reason for building gas. Do you know what causes extreme weather? Climate change. Do you know what contributes to catastrophic climate change? Coal and gas." Ameren Vice President of Regulatory and Legislative Affairs Rob Dixon said a reliable energy system needs a diversity of energy sources. "It's really important to remember that no single technology type can meet every customer need in every hour under every condition," Dixon said. Increasing renewables and keeping coal. The 2026 Integrated Resource Plan also increases the company's renewable energy buildout, with new solar plants and battery storage. "They are adding solar, they are adding batteries, and I think that's good," said James Owen, executive director of Renew Missouri. "I think that makes sense for long-term considerations. But I think the continued reliance on fossil fuels is going to end up costing customers more money than Ameren is currently anticipating." For the IRP, Ameren calculated the lifetime costs of each source of new energy it is considering building. The company found wind, solar and the kinds of natural gas plants that run consistently were the least expensive per kWh, while nuclear plants and the kind of gas plants that can turn on and off, potentially to supplement renewables, were the most expensive. The new plan also extends the lives of two coal plants. The Sioux Coal plant would close three years later than planned in 2023, while the Labadie plant would keep all four units operational until 2042, when two were originally set to retire in 2036. Arora said that decision was made to save money. "Labadie remains one of the most affordable plants in the country and recognizing the economic conditions for all our customers and how important reliability and affordability is, that's really factored into delaying the retirement of a few of the Labadie units by a few years," he said. Environmental advocates said there are other costs that come with coal. "Do you know why that plant is so affordable?" DeRose said. "It's because it doesn't have any modern pollution controls. So it's only affordable for the company. Those health externalities, those are what we have to pay for." Paying for new plants. To actually build power plants or to set new electricity rates, Ameren still has to take each request to the Public Service Commission as a case. While this plan does not change people's bills, Owen said the cost of the new power plants will trickle down to customers eventually. "Any time they build more generation, it's going to increase rates," Owen said. "I don't know how they can say that, 'Oh, this is [only costing] data centers,' when that's the main thing driving energy consumption right now. It's not that we're having this huge influx of people moving into Missouri. It is not this huge influx of other manufacturing jobs. It's data centers." Ameren's representatives said a Missouri utility law known as Senate Bill 4 requires data centers to pay for the infrastructure to serve them and said the companies do not receive discounted electric rates. "The safeguards in Senate Bill 4 are meaningful," Dixon said. "That's exactly what ensures that other customers are not bearing the costs caused by data centers. And in fact, we've done some projections, and we expect that our customers are going to see projected savings of $21 million over the next two years driven by the data center customers that we've already committed." The Sierra Club's DeRose wants more people to get involved in the utility planning process and is organizing a protest against Ameren on Oct. 10. "They need to hear your voice, the average customer's voice, if we're going to see the company change its ways and change its addiction to fossil fuels into something that is more sustainable for our future," DeRose said. Correction: Two units of the Labadie coal plant were scheduled to retire in 2036. A previous St. Louis Public Radio article misstated the year.

Spotlight on: Ameren. Ameren is a regional energy company dedicated to delivering reliable energy while helping meet the evolving needs of customers and communities. Through innovation, collaboration and long-term sustainability planning, Ameren continues to advance cleaner energy solutions across Missouri and Illinois, earning Champion Level status in the 2025 St. Louis Green Business Challenge. As part of the 2025 Challenge, Ameren highlighted its Champion Innovation Project, Powering Growth. The project showcased a variety of initiatives designed to strengthen energy reliability, support economic growth and advance sustainability goals throughout the region, all rooted in collaboration. "Together, we are more powerful than each of us can be on our own," said Gwen Mizell, Senior Vice President, Chief Sustainability Officer for Ameren. "It is through collaboration that we build trust. It is through collaboration that we create and execute meaningful, sustainable programs that help deliver stability to all our community members. And it's through collaboration that we share our knowledge about what's working, what's not, why not, and where we go from here." That collaborative approach helped drive significant results. Through Ameren Missouri's BizSavers(R) program, more than 230 Missouri businesses saved over $2.9 million and nearly 30 million kilowatt-hours of energy by upgrading to high-efficiency HVAC systems since July 2024. In addition, an initiative to repurpose retiring wood utility poles prevented more than 5,500 tons of wood waste from entering landfills over the past three years. Ameren also continued investing in technologies that improve energy reliability. During major storm events from January through June 2025, the company's smart switch technology prevented more than 150,000 customer outages by automatically rerouting power when disruptions occurred. The company made notable progress in expanding renewable energy resources as well. New solar generation brought online in 2024 produced enough energy to power approximately 93,000 homes annually. Ameren also began constructing or planning four additional solar projects capable of powering more than 117,000 homes each year and announced plans for its first large-scale lithium-ion battery installation to support customer reliability. Beyond infrastructure investments, Ameren demonstrated its commitment to the communities it serves. Following the May 16, 2025 tornado, the company donated $1 million in relief funding for survivors and made an additional $4 million available for customer bill payment assistance. Ameren also partnered with hundreds of agencies to help provide more than $75 million in available energy assistance to customers in need. Ameren's commitment to collaboration was further recognized through the 2025 Green Jean Ponzi Collaborative Action Award, which honors organizations that work together on initiatives extending beyond traditional sustainability practices. Through investments in cleaner energy, innovative technologies and strong community partnerships, Ameren continues to demonstrate how sustainability and reliability can work hand in hand to power the future of the St. Louis region.

GIS vs air insulated substation: when the site decides. Ameren's Goalby substation shows the real GIS vs air insulated substation test: not whether the lot is small, but whether site cost scales with area. The usual way to ask whether gas insulated switchgear is worth it goes something like this: is the site too small for a conventional air insulated substation? That question has an answer, and the answer is almost always no, so the conversation ends there and the utility builds air insulated. A project Ameren Illinois completed just west of downtown Belleville suggests the question is asked backwards. The site was not short of room. What it was short of was ground. What Ameren built, in Ameren's words. The Goalby Substation, named for Belleville native and PGA golfer Bob Goalby, sits at 1080 S. 20th St. Ameren's own release describes it as "the first gas insulated substation (GIS) on Ameren's transmission system," built to provide "another intersection to reroute power as it flows through the region," which lets the utility restore service faster after storms. On the design, the release is direct: "Unlike traditional air insulated substations, this GIS facility uses advanced equipment housed within compact, sealed enclosures. This design results in a footprint about one-third the size of a typical transmission substation, while still delivering the same or even greater capabilities." Then comes the sentence that does the real work: "That smaller footprint allowed Ameren to build the substation in an area located above old mine shafts running underground from legacy coal mining industries in Belleville." Read it in that order and the causation runs the opposite way from the usual story. The footprint was not the objective. It was the mechanism. The hardware premium was paid out of a different budget. Harman Ormani, Ameren's project manager for Goalby, puts the reason plainly: "This GIS design allowed us to keep costs as low as possible for customers while maintaining the highest levels of safety, performance and reliability. The compact layout reduced the amount of engineering work required to mitigate possible issues caused by the mine." So the justification was site preparation, not switchgear. Ameren bought a more expensive assembly in order to buy less of something else, and that something else was the work of making undermined ground safe to build on. Ameren has not published a cost figure for Goalby, and DistroForge LLC is not going to supply one. What the utility does say is that the compact layout reduced the mitigation engineering, and that is enough to make the general point without a number attached to it. Ormani also supplies the contrast that makes this worth writing about at all: "It's a relatively unique situation. These GIS designs are typically built in very crowded downtown city blocks and other places where space is limited." The standard use case is scarcity of land. Goalby was scarcity of competent ground on land the utility could otherwise use. The test that actually decides it. Here is the generalization, offered as arithmetic rather than as a finding, because that is what it is. Gas insulated switchgear loses to air insulated switchgear on equipment cost. It will keep losing. It wins when some other cost on the site scales with area. If you shrink the station to a third of the footprint and nothing else on the site gets cheaper, you have paid a premium for nothing. If a per-square-foot site cost exists, shrinking the area shrinks that cost too, and the comparison changes. The qualifying question is therefore not is my site small? It is what does this site cost per square foot to make buildable, and does that cost scale with area? Mine subsidence is one instance. The same structure holds anywhere a site carries an area-proportional preparation cost: * Contaminated soil remediation on a brownfield, priced by volume removed or treated. * Rock excavation where competent bedrock sits close to grade. * Wetland mitigation, where required acreage tracks disturbed acreage. * Flood-plain fill, priced by cubic yard. * Seismic ground improvement, priced by treated area. * Urban land itself, which is the textbook case and the one Ormani names. Where the binding site cost is fixed rather than area-proportional, a permit, a study, an interconnection charge, the arithmetic does not work and air insulated wins as usual. Why buyers miss this trade. This is an observation about how the work is organized, not about engineering. The civil and geotechnical budget and the equipment budget usually live in different departments, with different approvers and different benchmarks. The department asked to approve the switchgear premium is not the department that books the savings in site preparation, and it is frequently not in the room when the geotechnical scope gets priced. An engineer comparing bay-for-bay equipment cost will conclude, correctly, that GIS is more expensive. The comparison only comes out differently if someone builds the site-preparation estimate under both footprints and puts the two totals side by side. On most projects nobody is asked to do that, because nobody owns the question. If you take one operational thing from this piece, it is that the GIS evaluation belongs in the siting review, not in the equipment review. Two things to settle before the footprint conversation. The insulating gas. Nothing Ameren has published says whether Goalby uses SF6 or an SF6-free alternative, and DistroForge LLC is not going to assume. For anyone specifying in 2026, gas selection is a lifecycle-cost and regulatory-risk decision in its own right, and it should be resolved before the footprint question rather than after. DistroForge LLC has covered the SF6-free switchgear question separately; start there if that is unsettled for your system. The operating change. A sealed, pressurized assembly removes visual verification of an open point. A lineman cannot look at a gas insulated bay and see an air gap the way they can at an air-break disconnect. That is a general property of the technology, and it means switching orders, tagging practice and operator training all change. Utilities absorb that routinely. It is still work, it lands on operations rather than on the project, and it should be scoped before commitment rather than discovered after energization. Where this trade is available and unrecognized. Ameren's release says the compact design is what made an undermined parcel usable. That is a repeatable situation, not a one-off, and it is findable. State geological surveys publish mined-area and subsidence maps, and state environmental agencies publish brownfield inventories. Put those alongside a utility's published capital plan and the overlap shows where an area-scaled site cost is about to meet a substation project. For anyone quoting into that overlap, the useful posture is to offer a compact alternate rather than wait to be asked for one, because the buyer's own qualifying question is probably still is the lot small enough. Compact designs are showing up in other constrained settings too, particularly around modular substations for data center interconnections and data center substation design, where the constraint is schedule and space rather than ground conditions. The short version. Goalby is one substation, and one project does not make a rule. What it does is show the rule clearly, because the utility stated the causation itself: the footprint is what allowed the site to be used. So when the GIS versus air insulated question comes up, do not start with the equipment. Start with what the ground costs, and whether that cost gets smaller when the station does. Siting decisions like this one surface in filings and utility releases months before they reach a purchase order. The Feeder is its free briefing on the regulatory shifts, supply chain signals and market forces that shape equipment procurement. Sign up here. Related reading. Frequently asked questions. When does a GIS substation beat an air insulated substation? How much smaller is a GIS substation? Why did Ameren choose GIS for the Goalby Substation? What should a buyer settle before comparing GIS and air insulated designs? Free Member Access Track this beat without paying per report. Free Member tier. 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