Granite City
BrownfieldSt. Cloud, Benton, Minnesota · Northern States Power Co - Minnesota
Granite City is a natural gas plant in St. Cloud, Benton, Minnesota, retired 2019-06-01. Retired generation sites are among the most attractive datacenter redevelopment targets: the existing interconnection was sized for roughly 72 MW of generation, so the grid hookup, transmission rights, and often cooling-water access are already in place — collapsing the speed-to-power timeline versus a greenfield build.
Former use & capacity
Grid hookup & remediation
Site conditions & market — Benton County
County-level intelligence for this site's location — the power economics, water, hazard, connectivity, and workforce a developer screens before ever visiting. Assembled from FEMA NRI, BLS QCEW, FCC BDC, USGS water-use, and EIA.
Market & workforce
Power economics & interconnection
Water & cooling
Hazard, flood & connectivity
County-level context — address-level utility offerings and flood zoning vary within the county. Confirm site-specific service with the utility and a Phase I ESA.
Nearby brownfield & retired-generation sites
A proximity screen of other retired-plant, contaminated, and EPA-flagged sites near Granite City — the environmental neighborhood, ranked by legacy grid capacity.
| Site | Former use | Legacy MW | Distance | Cleanup status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sherburne County | coal plant | 765 | 18.0 mi | — |
Derived from GridCensus's retired-generator & EPA brownfield dataset. Not a substitute for an ASTM E1527 Phase I environmental radius report.
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Nearby datacenter candidate sites
Scored candidate sites near Granite City, ranked by DC Readiness.
| Site | Type | State | County | Voltage | Capacity | Queue wait | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SHERBURNE COUNTY | Substation-Adjacent | MN | Sherburne County | 345 kV | 600 MW | 2.8 yrs | 66.9 |
| MONTICELLO | Substation-Adjacent | MN | Sherburne County | 345 kV | 600 MW | 2.8 yrs | 62.9 |
| QUARRY | Substation-Adjacent | MN | Stearns County | 345 kV | 600 MW | 2.8 yrs | 62.6 |
| BENTON | Substation-Adjacent | MN | Benton County | 345 kV | 600 MW | 2.8 yrs | 62.0 |
| EC Coal Wright County | Greenfield | MN | Wright County | — | — | 1.4 yrs | 60.8 |
| EC Coal Benton County | Greenfield | MN | Benton County | — | — | 1.4 yrs | 60.0 |
| EC Near Sherburne County | Greenfield | MN | Sherburne | — | — | 1.4 yrs | 59.0 |
| EC Near Sherburne County | Greenfield | MN | Sherburne | — | — | 1.4 yrs | 58.3 |
See all datacenter sites in Minnesota →
Dataset updated . Screening estimates derived from public data sources.
Brownfield attributes are derived from EIA retired-generator and EPA public data. Existing capacity reflects the retired plant's historical nameplate, not deliverable interconnection for a new load. Confirm reusable interconnection rights, remediation status, and site availability with the utility, ISO, and current owner.
Go deeper than the public screen
Every site and score for Granite City, St. Cloud, Benton, Minnesota is free to browse. Pro adds Watchtower on 25 sites, alerts when new candidate sites, datacenters or interconnection-queue requests appear in your markets, score and capacity history, and CSV export. Enterprise adds team seats, weekly data files for all 147,272 sites, the REST API and an MCP server for AI tools.