Citizen groups are continuing their opposition to a microgrid energy facility in Tucker County.
Tucker United, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and Friends of Blackwater are appealing to the state’s Intermediate Court of Appeals to get more information about the proposed Ridgeline power plant in Tucker County. The groups originally appealed directly to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Air Quality Board after the regulatory organizations approved redactions in Fundamental Data’s draft permit citing “trade secrets.”
Olivia Miller of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy said information important to public safety like emissions data and design details are blacked out on the company’s permit application.
“From the start, the project has raised a lot of concerns,” she said. “Not just because of its potential pollution and size, but also because of how little the public has been allowed to know about it.”
The application makes no mention of what the Ridgeline facility will power, and Fundamental Data only confirmed the site will host a data center in response to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
Miller points out that even less is known about the company than the construction project. Fundamental Data’s website boasts nothing more than a corporate logo and an automated chatbot. She worries about what this level of secrecy will mean for future data center projects, which lawmakers have been keen to support.
“Ultimately, this is about the larger potential data center build-out across the state,” she said “We know that this will see a terrible precedent, not just for Tucker County, but for communities all across West Virginia if permits are allowed to be so secretive, and for any company to hide pollution data under the guise of confidential business information.”
A different data center and microgrid project is already underway in Mingo County.
The intermediate court filing comes on the heels of a separate legal action in September when Tucker United, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and Sierra Club challenged the DEP’s approval of the Ridgeline air quality permit, also citing excessive secrecy.
Nikki Forrester, spokesperson for Tucker United, said their original appeal was rejected in part because the Air Quality Board claimed they lacked jurisdiction to hear an appeal, as well as for being filed too early in the permitting process.
“This is really problematic because it means that people and the public didn’t have the ability to provide meaningful comments on this air quality permit when it was in its draft stage, and so we didn’t have the ability to submit those comments at a time when it mattered,” she said. “We also didn’t have the information we needed in order to really craft comments that address the specifics of the proposal, because there’s just so many unknowns about the project.”
Forrester said a hearing is scheduled for the appeal of the air quality permit application on Nov. 5 at 8:30 a.m. in Charleston.
