Utah environmentalists worry about proposed EPA rule to skip public comment on some air permits

As the Environmental Protection Agency proposes to expedite air quality permits for what it considers minor polluters, Utah environmental advocates worry the change would lead to a less transparent permitting process — especially, they say, for energy-hungry data centers.

The EPA announced it is considering streamlining air quality reviews for “minor sources” by skipping federally-mandated public comment periods. Under the proposal, state and local authorities could still decide to allow the public to weigh in. However, environmentalists are concerned that making the change at the federal level would close the door to the public to comment on projects in Utah.

“We can’t have an environmental protection agency that doesn’t know what the community needs to bring up, so they’re literally hurting themselves and hurting their own capacity to be able to make the best decisions possible,” Luis Miranda, senior campaign organizer at the Sierra Club said. 

According to the Sierra Club, the EPA list of “minor sources” include tractor trailer-sized diesel generators often used by data centers as backup energy sources. And as data centers become more ubiquitous throughout the country, those fossil fuel emissions add up, Miranda said.

“If they’re trying to use, for instance, other sources of energy, but they’re not able to create the load that the data center may need, they’ll probably turn off the backup generators (powered by fossil fuels),” Miranda said. “So the fact is that a lot of data centers end up doing that.” 

That’s the case in other states. An analysis from the Sierra Club found there were about 10,500 diesel generators in data centers in Northern Virginia, capable of producing nearly 27 gigawatts of power. 

According to the study, the data center diesel generators there are allowed to emit about 13,000 tons of toxic oxides of nitrogen and over 650 tons of fine particulate matter when combined, which, they say, is comparable to a large coal plant.

“If people don’t have the opportunity to talk about that and how that’s going to impact their lives, how is that going to impact their businesses, then we have no way to protect ourselves, right?” Miranda said.

However, EPA officials said in a news release that their goal is to reduce red tape and “responsibly speed up permitting.”

Minor sources generally have relatively low emissions, the EPA said, and the current process to approve its air quality permits “is already cumbersome.” They also said, “unnecessary public notices and comment procedures for projects with limited environmental impact only slow down the process.”

“The state and local authorities closest to the issues and the public should be making the decisions on the permitting process as much as possible, not Washington,”  EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a prepared statement.“Since day one, the Trump EPA has followed the law as written, and if finalized, the agency will continue to oversee that the law is upheld.”