It’s early morning. A high school student peers at the project on her laptop screen, tempted by the smell of biscuits someone is baking in the kitchen. Outside, a neighbor drives past, heading for the coffee shop at the end of the street, determined to get his daily morning cup on the way to meet co-workers at the new data center in town. None of them thought about the electricity humming through these moments. They just counted on the power to work when they plugged in, flipped a switch, ordered a latte or began to work.

Demand for reliable electricity in Mississippi is rising toward historic levels. That’s driven in part by greater reliance on electric devices in homes and workplaces. It’s also influenced by new data centers and other large business projects

Entergy Mississippi is responding by building the necessary infrastructure to support economic growth. Superpower Mississippi is the largest grid investment in the company’s history. The initiative will add more and better power to the grid – at a lower cost to customers – by 2030. This includes three advanced natural gas power plants in Greenville, Vicksburg and Ridgeland.

It also includes work to make the electrical grid more reliable and resilient – including a $300 million additional investment to cut outages in half at no new cost to customers. That work will increase tree trimming and upgrade poles to withstand more extreme weather. It will also expand the use of smart devices and real-time monitoring systems that automatically identify faults, re-route power and restore service faster. These improvements are made possible by investments from Amazon Web Services and other large utility customers in Mississippi.

These grid improvements aren’t cheap. Inflation, rising natural gas prices and higher-than-normal costs for lines, poles, transformers and construction equipment are affecting power bills across the country. But researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Brattle Consulting Group found that higher demand can actually lower prices. Economic growth in Mississippi is expected to keep residential customer bills 16% lower than they would have been otherwise.

New generating plants

In recent years, Entergy Mississippi has retired several legacy power plants, including Baxter Wilson in Vicksburg, Gerald Andrus in Greenville and Rex Brown near Jackson. In their place, the company is building three advanced new power plants that are more fuel-efficient and cost-effective. The Vicksburg Advanced Power Station is expected to be in service by August 2028. It will use natural gas but will be capable of using blended hydrogen fuel if warranted in the future. Hydrogen fuel emits no carbon dioxide and supports lower electricity rates.

The similar Delta Blues Advanced Power Station in Greenville will replace the Gerald Andrus plant, which reached 50 years of service in 2024. The Andrus plant will be retired when Delta Blues becomes operational in 2028. A third plant, Traceview Advanced Power Station in Ridgeland, is expected to come on line in 2029. These plants, along with Entergy Mississippi’s other power generation resources, will help support electricity demand from both residential customers and large customers, such as AWS and AVAIO Digital.

Customers will share a smaller portion of the costs than if the same plants had been built on their original schedule. Accelerated plant timelines enable Entergy Mississippi to acquire high-demand construction materials – such as turbines, poles, power lines and more – before incurring further cost increases due to nationwide data center demand. The Livermore-Brattle study also concluded that buying and protecting poles, wires and other electrical equipment is often the biggest factor in rising rates.

Potential for savings, fewer outages

Despite those trends, electricity rates for Entergy Mississippi customers are already well below the national average. And Amazon and other large customers’ new contributions to the grid are further lowering power costs for customers in the 45 counties served by Entergy Mississippi.

New revenue from large commercial and industrial projects is fueling the other phase of Superpower Mississippi: investing 50% more in strengthening the grid to help reduce outages by half without additional costs for customers.

With $300 million in reliability investments, combined with construction and fuel cost savings from building new plants, customers will save $2 billion while keeping rates below the national average. More and better power at a lower cost – that’s Superpower Mississippi.

Learn more about Superpower Mississippi.

A version of this article was originally published online by the Clarion-Ledger.