Bring a Friend! Community Meeting for Panther Creek

You may already know that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA-DEP) granted a permit to allow Panther Creek Power to burn tires in addition to waste coal. Burning waste coal and tires puts cancer-causing air pollution into our air and pollutes our Lehigh River because the Panther Creek Power dump for their fly ash drains into the Lehigh. When tires are burned, known carcinogens like benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and dioxins are released into the air. What can we do? If you SMELL SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING! Call the PA-DEP to report the odor of burning tires at 866-255-5158. Then call Save Carbon County at 570-676-2644. Please leave a message so that we can monitor air quality and track the complaints in our region.

Now that the PA-DEP approved the tire burning application, we can see that Panther Creek Power doesn't see long-term potential for coal waste reclamation, and they need other things to burn on an industrial scale, like tires and tire-derived fuels.

You may also know that Panther Creek Power is one of the companies that emit toxic or hazardous air pollution which has applied for and been granted a Presidential two-year exemption from the EPA's hazardous air pollution limits. This means that Panther Creek Power can spew unlimited amounts of toxic pollution into the air we breathe. More information is available here.

It gets worse: Bitfarms, the Canadian company that owns Panther Creek Power, has announced that they intend to make the site a high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) data center for Bitcoin mining. More information is available here. The site will require massive amounts of electricity to power the computers and massive amounts of water to keep them cool. Panther Creek Power cannot possibly generate enough electricity to power the data center which means they will be drawing huge amounts of electricity from the grid (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland or PJM Interconnection), a regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity. They'll also be drawing millions of gallons of water for cooling - some of that super-heated water will need to be released as steam or back into the watershed. That means that Panther Creek will compete with residential use for electricity and water, which means rates will increase for all of us. This will truly be an economic and environmental disaster.

What can we do to save our air, the Lehigh River, and our hard-earned money? Please join us for a Community meeting at the Nesquehoning Recreation Center to discuss this development on Thursday, June 12th at 7pm. The Rec Center is at 335 W. Railroad Street.