Karen Feridun: Preserve local control on natural gas

The burgeoning data center boom in Pennsylvania is reminiscent of the early days of the fracking boom. No attention was given to the impacts fracking would have on public health or the environment. Unlike New York and Maryland, no studies were done to guide policy decisions about how, or even if, fracking should be allowed.

Gov. Ed Rendell, who enthusiastically supported natural gas development, admitted as much in 2016. “I made a mistake in the rush to get the economic part of fracking delivered to Pennsylvania,” he said. Even that admission fails to account for the myriad issues, and impacts, his administration and the state legislature chose to ignore.

Two decades later, it is Gov. Josh Shapiro who is rushing to get the economic part of data centers, the next generation in natural gas development, delivered. He has fast-tracked permitting, created an Office of Transformation and Opportunity “to ensure projects are moving at the speed of business,” and threatened to pull out of PJM unless it can speed up approvals of power projects.

And like his predecessor, he is dismissing the impacts, which are well-documented this time. Thousands of studies, including three done by our state, point to many profoundly negative impacts of the natural gas production that would fuel data centers, yet Shapiro recently called natural gas an “environmentally sustainable” source to power them. And the centers themselves strain water supplies, create noise and light pollution, and generate polluting waste streams.

All of it is cause for concern, but none more so than the section of his Lightning Plan called RESET that would strip municipal governments of siting authority over large-scale energy projects and give it to a central siting board. Representative Mandy Steele, D-Fox Chapel, introduced the RESET bill, HB 502.

Existing nuclear and natural gas power plants are not sufficient to provide the amount of electricity all those new data centers would need. The word coming from Sen. Dave McCormick’s Pennsylvania Innovation and Energy Summit in July is that natural gas would be the energy of choice.

It is not surprising, then, that the RESET board’s composition skews industry friendly, but it is outrageous that the board’s two private sector members — the PA Chamber and the Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades Council — have especially close ties to the industry and no accountability to the public. And it gets worse.

At the summit, Shapiro said that with the promised investments, “we can put Rob Bair’s guys to work.” Bair is the Building Trades’ president. One of the RESET Board’s seven votes would come from the group that would stand to benefit from every natural gas power plant project that would be approved.

Although Steele exclaimed at a House Energy Committee hearing in June that “HB 502 is not a renewable energy bill,” large-scale renewable projects would also be subject to the board’s approval. Some advocacy organizations support RESET as a way of deploying desperately needed solar power to communities that resist renewable energy solutions, but enacting a bill that results in more natural gas power plants to get a few solar projects done makes no sense.

Pennsylvania currently lags behind the rest of the country in energy from renewables. Of the 20 projects announced at McCormick’s summit, only one includes 51 solar projects that would power a total of 24,000 homes. Right now, just five of the data centers proposed in Northeastern Pennsylvania alone would use the electricity needed to power 5 million homes, or nearly all of the homes in Pennsylvania. None of it would come from renewable sources.

Pennsylvanians who hear their elected officials speaking in panicked tones about the unprecedented demand for electricity are wondering why they never heard about any of this until a few months ago and are struggling to recall when exactly they were asked for their input.

For them, their municipal governments, while being far from perfect, are the last refuge when there is no daylight between federal and state officials on a generation of natural gas development that would perpetuate the harms that still go unaddressed while inviting new ones from the massive data centers it would power.

Contact your state legislators to let them know you oppose HB 502. Preserve local control.

Karen Feridun is co-founder of the Better Path Coalition and No False Climate Solutions PA.