(The Center Square) – Air quality permits allowing for the operation of 645 generators by Amazon and Duke Energy have been approved by the Division of Air Quality within the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, a nine-office operation in six states and Washington, D.C., condemned the action late Friday. It said the “highly polluting, diesel-fired generators” would “pose significant health concerns for nearby communities.”
Emissions are capped and include additional emissions testing and monitoring requirements, said the Department of Environmental Quality. Amazon is permitted 588 emergency backup engines at the Energy Way Tech Campus data center on Airport Road in Hamlet, generators that would operate during power outages and in limited times of maintenance, testing and activation.
Duke Energy is permitted 57 temporary nonemergency “bridge power” engines to provide Amazon’s facility with energy until the data center is connected to the power grid. Within a year of starting operations, Duke is required to retire the engines.
In a release, Caroline Cress, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center said, “Amazon, one of the wealthiest companies in the world, and Duke Energy, a regulated monopoly, can and should do better than belching deadly soot pollution into the air North Carolinians breathe from a whopping 649 diesel-fired generators powering a massive data center. North Carolina regulators failed to protect people’s health and the air we all breathe by blindly accepting the companies’ self-interested statements instead of doing their job to investigate the key facts. North Carolina communities should be able to expect more from their regulators than simply trusting two extremely wealthy and politically powerful companies without any verification.”
The Division of Air Quality, in its release on the permits granted, said federal air quality standards have been met in the state for 11 consecutive years. It said, “DAQ expects these standards to continue to be met with the issuance of these permits.”
Perennially among the most wanted locations, North Carolina again landed one of the Big Five on June 4, 2025, when Amazon said it would invest $10 billion toward its Amazon Web Services data center supply chain.
The global technology company, replete with e-commerce, digital streaming and online advertising, said a minimum of 500 jobs in high-tech cloud computing and artificial intelligence would be in an innovation campus in Richmond County along the South Carolina border. Such jobs will be data center engineers, network specialists, engineering operations managers, security specialists, and other technical roles, Amazon said.
The investment nearly doubles ($12 billion) what the company has poured into the Tarheel State since 2010. That year was the turn of economic development, with Republicans taking majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly for the first time in 140 years since Reconstruction and enacting major business and tax policy reforms.
The Big Five tech companies, as they are colloquially known, are Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet. Former names were Facebook rather than Meta, and Google rather than Alphabet.
Amazon’s 2024 financial report credited 11% growth year over year, up to $638 billion. It said Amazon Web Services revenue is $108 billion. Ten years earlier, the company revenue was $89 billion and web services $4.6 billion.
Richmond County is fiscally among the state’s bottom third of 100 counties. The five-year unemployment rate exceeds 6%, median household income is in the neighborhood of $50,000 and the poverty rate is just below 20%. Population is between 90,000 and 100,000.
A poll released in October from the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation found 57% of North Carolina respondents saying fiscal responsibility tied to expansion of energy infrastructure needed to support data centers should be paid by companies
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