The expert witness for the citizen groups challenging a Tucker County power plant air permit said the project’s air emissions would likely qualify it as a larger air pollution emitter than what it is currently designated.
On Wednesday, Dr. Ron Sahu testified as an expert witness in front of the West Virginia Air Quality Board, in the hearing on the merits of the appeal to an air quality permit the Department of Environmental Protection issued to Fundamental Data LLC earlier this year.
The permit is for an off-grid natural gas power plant proposed between the towns of Davis and Thomas in Tucker County. The plant is intended to power a data center complex.
Three citizen groups — Tucker United, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Sierra Club — appealed the state’s decision to issue an air permit to the project, citing more than a dozen specific objections.
Those objections include the DEP’s decision to allow the company to keep large sections of its permit application secret from the public. The DEP has maintained that the agency followed state law and evaluated the company’s business confidentiality claims before determining the omitted materials met the criteria.
The citizen groups are also challenging the state’s designation of the project as a “minor” pollution source, contending that the power plant should be considered a larger air pollution emitter and be subject to more stringent regulations.
The two-day hearing, which protestors returned for, wrapped up Thursday, and now the Air Quality Board has 60 days before it has to issue a final decision on whether to revoke the air permit.
Sahu, a mechanical engineer and an expert in air pollution and emissions, also testified to the board on the concealed permit information in a session closed to the public.
The involved parties had previously agreed on a protective order that allowed Sahu and Mike Becher, the attorney representing the citizens, to access the information kept secret from the public.
In his public testimony, Sahu said that based on his calculations using the publicly available permit information, the power plant would likely exceed the emissions limits of a minor pollution source.
“That’s what this calculation confirms,” he said. “This is not a minor source.”
But even then, Sahu said that his calculations likely underestimate some of the air emissions because of the number of variables that can impact emissions.
In response to public comments about the air permit’s designation earlier this year, the DEP said that, based on the information submitted by the company and confirmed as reasonable by the agency’s Division of Air Quality, the project’s potential emissions would stay below the thresholds that would trigger a major source classification.
The agency also said that if the project ultimately couldn’t operate within the limits in its air permit, it would have to either modify its permit and reduce its operations to meet the limits or undergo the permitting process for a larger emitter.
Later in the hearing, Jerry Williams, the DEP engineer who was involved with the review and issuance of the permit, testified and said that the permit application represented the worst-case emission levels.
The DEP has said it has followed federal and state permitting requirements in its approval of the permit, which Williams reaffirmed in his testimony.
Sahu said there are no guarantees that the facility will not exceed the permit limits without additional requirements like major source modeling and continuous air monitoring.
“You are pretending here that you can actually demonstrate that you will be below the major source threshold, even on the best of times, even if you have continuous monitoring. And here you don’t even have that,” he said. “You’re truly flying blind.”