Socrates: Williams Is Building a 2 GW Off-Grid Power Fleet for Meta in New Albany, Ohio

Key takeaways

• Socrates Power Solution Facilities is Williams' (NYSE: WMB) behind-the-meter power program for Meta's New Albany, Ohio data-center campus: Aterio's energy record tracks four facilities (Socrates South, Socrates North, STY, and Neo) totaling about 2.32 GW of combined capacity, 1,486 MW of gas generation plus 838 MW / 1,676 MWh of two-hour battery storage.
• Socrates South went from Ohio Power Siting Board filing (March 7, 2025) to approval (June 9, 2025, case 25-0185-EL-BLN) in three months, with first power targeted between Q3 2026 and year-end, a timeline no grid-connected plant waiting in PJM's interconnection queue can match.
• Every Socrates facility pairs gas turbines with a two-hour Tesla battery system; storage across the program totals 838 MW / 1,676 MWh, including announced Phase 2 battery expansions at Socrates South and North.
• None of the fleet will be physically connected to the electric grid, and the two largest tranches, STY and Neo, do not target activation until 2028; in the meantime Meta moved in November 2025 to draw temporary grid power through Intel's unused Green Chapel substation.
• Williams has committed $5.1 billion to gas-fired power projects for data centers, anchored by a 10-year fixed-price power purchase agreement with Meta; the STY facility was approved on June 26, 2026 (case 26-0169-EL-BLN).

When the Ohio Power Siting Board approved a 200 MW gas plant for a Meta data center in June 2025, the trade press covered it as a novelty: a pipeline company building a power plant. Aterio's energy record shows what it actually was, the first tranche of a much larger program. Williams (NYSE: WMB), acting through its subsidiary Will-Power OH LLC, has now filed four behind-the-meter facilities under the Socrates Power Solution Facilities program in New Albany, Ohio, totaling about 2.32 GW of combined capacity, 1,486 MW of gas generation plus 838 MW / 1,676 MWh of two-hour battery storage, for the data-center campus Meta contracts through its affiliate Sidecat LLC.

The strength of the model is speed: Socrates South went from filing to approval in three months and targets first power in the second half of 2026, entirely outside PJM's interconnection queue. The catch is that none of this capacity will touch the grid, the two largest tranches do not arrive until 2028, and Meta is meanwhile pulling temporary grid power through a substation built for Intel. The off-grid fleet is real; it is just not keeping pace with the load.

Figure: The Socrates North site from orbit, June 2, 2025 to July 2, 2026: graded farmland develops into a full generation site, with the laydown yard and trailer rows filling in to the south. Captured via Sentinel-2, sourced through Copernicus. Image analysis by Aterio.

Figure: Socrates North under construction: turbine and engine rows standing across the generation pad, cranes mid-lift, and the laydown yard built out to the south, the advanced stage of construction behind the second-half 2026 first-power target. Captured via Vantor satellite imagery, May 18, 2026. Image analysis by Aterio.

Figure: Socrates South from orbit, March 14, 2025 to July 2, 2026: the generation site and the campus's tent-style data halls rise together from open fields. Captured via Sentinel-2, sourced through Copernicus. Image analysis by Aterio.

Figure: Socrates South under construction: turbine and engine rows filling the generation pad directly beside Meta's tent-style data halls, with the worker camp to the north and the laydown yard to the east. Captured via Vantor satellite imagery, May 18, 2026. Image analysis by Aterio.

From one plant to a 2 GW program

Aterio tracks the Socrates program at the facility, technology, and phase level, and the cadence tells the story. Capacity in Williams' Ohio filings has stepped up six times in 15 months:

• March 7, 2025: Socrates South filed with the Ohio Power Siting Board as case 25-0185-EL-BLN, 234.3 MW of simple-cycle gas turbines plus 17.5 MW of reciprocating engines, and was approved June 9, 2025. Environmental permit drawings: March 2025 filing, August 2025 revision.
• April 25, 2025: Socrates North filed as case 25-0188-EL-BGN, an identical 234.3 MW + 17.5 MW configuration.
• August 15 and November 4, 2025: two-hour battery systems added to South and North, 231 MW / 462 MWh per site: a 173.25 MW / 346.5 MWh Phase 1 plus an announced 57.75 MW / 115.5 MWh Phase 2 expansion, a 30-container authorization at each site.
• March 27, 2026: STY (Socrates the Younger) filed as case 26-0169-EL-BLN, 296 MW of turbines, 10 MW of engines, and a 116 MW / 232 MWh battery, and was approved June 26, 2026 with 36 conditions, on 109 acres at Clover Valley Road and Harrison Road NW.
• June 23, 2026: Neo filed, the largest tranche yet, 666.4 MW of simple-cycle turbines and 10 MW of reciprocating engines plus a 260 MW / 520 MWh battery (environmental permit).

Source: Aterio energy record; filing documents via the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio docket system.

What Williams is building

The Socrates fleet is a hybrid: aeroderivative and industrial gas turbines carry the base load, reciprocating engines trim, and batteries buffer. Per the equipment list reported by Power Engineering, Socrates South alone runs 3 Solar Turbines Titan 250s, 9 Solar PGM 130s, and 3 Siemens Energy SGT-400s, backed by Caterpillar 3520 gas engines (15 in the original filing, reduced to 7 in a later amendment per the Aterio record), a mobile SMT-130 standby turbine, and 8 Caterpillar C15 diesel generators for black start. Fuel arrives through two 24-inch natural gas pipelines, and gas supply is the one input a midstream company never has to queue for.

Figure: The Socrates North site plan from the OPSB staff report (case 25-0188-EL-BGN): the full generation fleet inside the sound wall, 15 CAT 3520 reciprocating engines (yellow), Titan 130 (blue), Titan 250 (green), and SGT-400 (orange) turbines, plus the gas yard, control building, and temporary laydown yard along Green Chapel Road NW. Source: Ohio Power Siting Board, Socrates North filing (case 25-0188-EL-BGN), retrieved via the PUCO docket system.

Key program parameters:

• Developer / operator: Will-Power OH LLC, a Williams subsidiary; equipment from Solar Turbines, Siemens Energy, Caterpillar, and Tesla (batteries), with Verdantas as consultant.
• Customer: Sidecat LLC, the Meta affiliate contracting the adjacent data-center campus; the first two facilities sit on roughly 20 acres inside Sidecat's 740-acre parcel.
• Gas generation (both technologies): 1,486 MW combined across the four facilities, per the Aterio energy record: 1,431 MW of simple-cycle turbines plus 55 MW of reciprocating engines.
• Battery storage: two-hour Tesla systems at every facility, 838 MW / 1,676 MWh program-wide, including announced 57.75 MW / 115.5 MWh Phase 2 expansions at each of South and North.
• Grid connection: none; every facility operates behind the meter and, per the OPSB, "will not be physically connected to the electric power grid."
• Cost: roughly $1.6 billion for the first two facilities and their substation, according to POWER Magazine's June 2025 approval coverage.

Source: Power Engineering, POWER Magazine, and the Aterio energy record.

A pipeline company becomes a power company

Socrates is the lead project in a deliberate pivot. According to Power Engineering's November 2025 reporting, Williams has committed $5.1 billion to gas-fired power projects for data-center customers, anchored by a 10-year fixed-price power purchase agreement with Meta and underwritten, per the company, at roughly 20 percent pre-tax returns. "We continue to see a very robust pipeline of opportunities that we think extends throughout the end of the decade and beyond," CEO Chad Zamarin told investors in November 2025. The company is already replicating the model at a second Meta site in Ohio: the Apollo Power Generation Project in Wood County, a separate facility Aterio tracks under its own record. It is the same structural shift Aterio flagged when former bitcoin miners repurposed their power-rich sites into AI hosting: the scarce asset in the AI buildout is firm power, and the companies that already hold it are moving up the stack.

Socrates has also made New Albany the densest behind-the-meter gas cluster in the country. With STY's approval on June 26, 2026, the Ohio Power Siting Board has now cleared its sixth data-center power plant in the New Albany area, counting Will-Power's fleet and EdgeConneX's three PowerConneX plants.

The catch: off-grid, one customer, and 2028

The same choices that make Socrates fast also concentrate its risk. Because the fleet is behind the meter, it skips PJM's interconnection queue, but it also cannot sell a single megawatt-hour to anyone other than the campus next door: the entire 2.32 GW program is contracted to one customer, Meta's Sidecat LLC. Williams' 10-year fixed-price PPA converts that concentration into contracted cash flow, and it also means the fleet's economics live and die with one counterparty's AI buildout.

The timing gap is the more immediate tension. Socrates South and North target first power between Q3 2026 and year-end, per the Q3 2026 in-service dates in their OPSB applications and the November 2026 completion schedule reported by Power Engineering. But STY and Neo, which together hold about 1.36 GW of the program, do not target activation until mid- and late 2028, per the schedules in their OPSB filings tracked in the Aterio energy record. Meta's load is not waiting: in November 2025 the company asked Ohio regulators to let it draw temporary grid power through the Green Chapel substation, built for Intel's delayed New Albany fab, under a three-year arrangement running January 2026 through December 2028, with AEP Ohio stringing four temporary lines to the data center. The off-grid showcase, in other words, still leans on the grid for its bridge years, using capacity that only exists because Intel slowed down.

The generation itself is simple-cycle gas, chosen for speed over efficiency, and the STY approval came with 36 conditions attached. No gas generation has yet reached commercial operation: Socrates South and North are in an advanced stage of construction against their second-half 2026 targets (per the Aterio record, South's Phase 1 battery is already active, the program's first operating asset), while STY and Neo are newly announced, one approved in late June 2026 and the other filed the same week.

Bottom line

Socrates is the clearest expression yet of the midstream-to-power pivot: a pipeline company with $5.1 billion committed, a 10-year Meta PPA, and a 2.32 GW off-grid program assembled one OPSB filing at a time while the market was still reading it as a 200 MW story. The catch is concentration and timing: one customer, no grid optionality, and the majority of the capacity arriving in 2028 while Meta bridges on borrowed substation capacity through the exact same window.

What to watch: first power at Socrates South against its second-half 2026 target, the OPSB's handling of Neo, whether Apollo repeats the Socrates playbook in Wood County, and whether Meta extends or exits the Green Chapel arrangement as the on-site fleet catches up. Aterio tracks each facility, filing, and activation phase in its energy record, the same way we map the data-center side of this campus in Inside Meta's Prometheus Campus Shift and the on-site gas-and-battery power stack behind xAI's Colossus 1.

Aterio tracks U.S. data center and power projects in real time, from early siting filings to satellite-confirmed construction. Explore Aterio's latest U.S. Data Center Report for state-by-state insights, provider comparisons, and project pipeline analysis, or schedule a call to see how our data can support your investment analysis.