House Bill 2014 would make it possible to build microgrid near schools or neighborhoods. John Amos E. Kraftwerk, although on the other side of the river from many houses in downtown Poca, W.VA. (Dian Ray for West Virginia Watch)
The governor of West Virginia and the legislature want to put coal and natural gas power plants in their backyards.
You want to rob the local governments of your financing.
And they want to expose them to air, water and even noise pollution.
This week, the Senate is changing into an invoice supported by Patrick Morrisey governor in order to offer the data center company at the expense of all other treasure contracts. House Bill 2014 Would enable data centers to apply for a special status of the Ministry of Commerce from West Virginia, which is released from the local government regulations.
I wrote in January About how the state is not ready for data centers, and this legislation makes what I said even more relevant today. Data centers exploit a lot of power, be it from your own on site, which promotes this legislation from your own microgrid (but does not require) or a connection to what we consider as a normal network.
The bill discussed on Tuesday in the Senate Economic Development Committee. District commissioners said about the harmful economic effects of the law that I will later achieve. But the President of West Virginia Coal Association, Chris Hamilton, was called to talk about what he perceives as the positive effects of the law on coal. He mentioned that he believes that the invoice will lead to “modular coal -fired power plants”, which will take over the hope of the nuclear industry in compact modular reactors.
To take the language out of the Coal Association: I have some Pixie dust to sell it if you think that Tech company like Google is investing in unproven technology such as modular coal -fired power plants, since the industry is the case due to affordable natural gas in decline.
I will again mention here that the electricity invoices in West Virginia are partly to ensure that the state adheres to coal power, while other countries have accepted gas and renewable energies. Even one of our supply companies has said It is expected to convert coal -fired power plants into natural gas. Of course the legislator wants to do so Make it more tough.
Ignore the fact that modular coal -fired power plants are not really one thingThe intention remains that supporters of the invoice want these data centers and that companies for fossil fuels are hungry for the associated microgrids that they will bring with them. The invoice frees data centers and its microgrids from any The provisions of the local government and eliminates the opportunity for all US residents of our respective cities to make contributions to approval or positioning.
Near a primary school? Too bad.
Do you like to give your food fresh from a local farm? I hope you don’t mind that it is next to a natural gas or even a coal system.
What about this view of the mountains? It will look good if it doesn’t matter to you, the stack of smoke.
I don’t create an example from the air. Only last monthSomeone applied for building a natural gas system in Tucker County near Davis and Thomas. The application does not say that you supply a data center with electricity, but I trust that you can read between the lines. The approval states that it does not connect to the network and instead offers the users the opportunity. The company name is fundamental data.
This gas system and this data center will only be a few miles from the next school and the houses. There are also only a few miles from the compact but lively cities of Davis and Thomas, national tourist destinations. Are gas systems -microgrids and data centers there, what you need there?
If the governor gets what he wants, the local governments may not have a say in such decisions.
Data centers also exploit hundreds of thousands or even millions of gallons water a day. The governor expressly mentions water when he says that the natural resources in West Virginia will operate data centers. I ask: whose water? Why should we give Amazon, Google, Facebook or another tech company unrestricted access to our groundwater, on which many West Virgins for drinking water are dependent? West Virginians in South -West Virginia and throughout the state have asked for tidy water as long as we can remember.
In another example of trying to extract the profit resources of our state, a water filling system in Jefferson County was recently rejected Because of local zoning and severe public opposition. This calculation takes these options to protect the water in your community from data centers.
Some local governments have spoken about the loss of local control. They were also noisy about the loss of tax revenue if this bill goes away. The West Virginia Center of Budget and Politics published A contribution this week, but I’ll summarize it here. According to this legislation, the counties would be better off if an industry than a data center bought and built a facility on a property within the land border. This is because the tax revenue, as soon as a data center was built, would go almost exclusively into the state coffers.
In Davis and Thomas’s novel data center example, Tucker County could lose tax revenue of almost 8 million US dollars if the country used for a data center instead of almost anything. These income still exist. It just doesn’t go to the local government, the local emergency services, the local police or the local schools. Instead, it would go to a novel “Personal Income Tax Reducing Fund” and “Electric Grid Stabilization and Security Fund”.
Read a different way: The local school revenue would remove income tax for the prosperous. WVCBP wrote beforehand These income tax cuts offer people who earn less than 65,000 US dollars a year. In the meantime, people at the top benefit the most. This legislation would like to achieve the income from local school revenue for tax cuts for the richest people in our state.
The other novel fund claims to remedy the stability of the grids, and his supporters say that he will keep the state’s electricity bills low. However, it is crucial to point out that this is a subsidy – a handout to save the coal -fired power plants of our supply companies that I just can’t compete on the free market. It could possibly reduce the amount of future invoice increases due to costly coal power if sufficient income from local governments is successfully stolen, but the invoices will not be reduced.
The calculation of the data center contains other provisions that encourage the supply companies to double the coal. That is in accordance with other bills in this session who are looking for a coal “Renaissance” And complicate So that the supply companies switch to another source as coal, even if this was more cost -effectively. It seems that our chosen officials intend to commission coal consumption regardless of the tax or environmental costs for West Virginians to ensure that carbon barons can continue to benefit.
It is tough to wrap our heads to do everything that happens at the state and federal level these days. But here is what I can say.
Our legislator and our Republican governor dominated by Republican would like to rob the local governments of their tax revenue, which finance their courts, the police, the EMS, the firefighters and their schools. You want to take the chance for anyone, say that this does not belong here or this thing belongs could make too much noise For someone who sleeps at night. And they want to give the prosperous and treasure taxes for billion dollar companies to do tax cuts to do so.
For me that doesn’t sound like a compact government for people.
