It’s been years, but Ed Gardner still remembers the moment he fully realized the magnitude of Amazon’s investment in Mississippi.
“I was standing on the site,” described Gardner, the VP of Business and Economic Development for Entergy Mississippi. Then he heard a colleague remark, “Can you imagine what this is going look like? And what this is going to do for this area?”
“I get chills,” said Gardner. Since then, he’s witnessed firsthand the transformative impact of AWS’s investment in the state. As the largest investor-owned electric utility in the state, Entergy Mississippi covers the western half of the state and is seeing unprecedented growth.
“The economic impacts of this project in central Mississippi are huge,” Gardner explains. “Tens of billions of dollars of investment in central Mississippi is going to transform this area. That kind of money and revenue coming in to help schools, parks, roads, and infrastructure, is going to change this area for a very long time.”
The investment is particularly significant for Entergy Mississippi’s operations. They’re constructing three new state-of-the-art power generation plants, which will create about 60 jobs. Outside of the company’s solar sites, this is the first time they’ve constructed new generation since building their nuclear facility at Grand Gulf in the 1980s.
“It’s driving down costs for all of our customers to bring in a customer of this size,” Gardner notes. “We have one of the most impoverished rates of any part of the country in the mid-south area where Entergy serves. Projects like AWS coming to our market provide tremendous value for all our customers. Without growth like that, our other customers would have to bear the full cost when we need to upgrade, modernize, or replace units.”
For Mississippi, AWS’s investment represents not just immediate growth, but a long-term economic transformation.
