In the midst of a long, repetitive process, it’s easy to get lost in the fog of monotony and mind-numbing minutia. Simple truths that were crystal clear at the beginning are incrementally obscured by empty assertions and unverifiable pledges of future fidelity.
The more meandering the course, the less attention is paid to what was obvious at the outset. The enormous stakes that animate the debate are clouded by tedium and technobabble.
And then an unexpected voice unintentionally cuts through the haze with a few simple but illuminating words.
“This is the way things are normally done,” said Andrew Markle of KCI Technologies, testifying for Essential Energy LLC at Archbald Borough Council’s sixth conditional use hearing on the developer’s application to build a 400-megawatt natural gas power plant on Eynon Jermyn Road.
Essential Energy is tied to Archbald-based Kriger Construction Inc. Other Kriger-linked firms also propose the nearly 620,000-square-foot Project Boson data center across the street from the power plant and four data centers and three power plants on Bell Mountain in Dickson City.
The Essential Energy power plant would loom over Staback Park and sink property values and quality of life in the Highlands Archbald residential community. The Valley View School District’s campuses are about half a mile away. The plaza in front of the Highlands hosts a preschool and a developer plans to build assisted living and skilled nursing homes nearby.
These logistical realities should have been enough to nix the power plant preemptively, but Archbald residents are forced to endure endless hearings in which the heart of their community is “conceptually” carved up like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.
The developers behind nearly all of the data center and power plant proposals targeting Archbald have provided precious few specifics officials might use to responsibly gauge their impacts. Officials and everyday citizens are repeatedly told the plans are in the “conceptual stage.” Details will gel as the projects progress through future regulatory and design phases.
In layman’s terms, they’re making it up as they go along.
“We go from conceptual to preliminary to detailed to as-constructed to operational, and this is just the way that these projects are produced,” Markle said.
Because the Essential Energy project is still in the conceptual stage, Markle’s answer to many seemingly basic questions was, “I don’t know.”
“We’re refining the design as we’re going,” he said at Tuesday’s three-hour hearing, endured by about 70 residents who are emphatically fed up with the way things are normally done.
Markle is right about the design and permitting processes for heavy industrial development. It’s normal for many details to remain fluid from design to construction and operation — when the projects are sited on land that is unquestionably appropriate for industrial use.
There is nothing remotely normal about shoehorning data centers and power plants in the midst of homes, schools, public parks and wildlife.
The concept itself is the problem. It has been from the beginning of this long, repetitive process. Even if Markle and other Essential Energy “expert” witnesses offered a concrete, nuts-and-bolts plan that addressed every conceivable impact, the project simply doesn’t fit the site.
Ironically, Markle’s most specific testimony on Tuesday reinforced this crystal-clear truth. He shared details of a pair of meetings with local first responders and county emergency management officials. He said Archbald’s volunteer firefighters are already familiar with power plants because of the Lackawanna Energy Center in Jessup.
The LEC is on land zoned for industrial use, off a highway built specifically for industrial development.
Markle assured that a “defense in layers” approach would ensure timely, effective response to fires and other emergencies at the Essential Energy plant shoehorned between Staback Park, the Highlands Archbald, the Valley View School District’s campuses, a preschool and assisted living and skilled nursing homes on a road that barely supports current residential traffic.
Markle said Essential Energy would “need robust engineering safeguards and procedures and codes to make sure that the emergency is mostly taken care of before the first responders arrive.” In an emergency, he said, Lackawanna County’s 911 system would notify residents to shelter-in-place or evacuate, but the need to evacuate would be “extremely, extremely rare, or maybe not even possible.”
I’m glad the developers are considering disaster management in the conceptual stage of the project, but it seems to me that even an “extremely, extremely rare, or maybe not even possible” need to evacuate Staback Park, the Highlands Archbald, the Valley View School District’s campuses, a preschool and assisted living and skilled nursing homes is ample evidence that the Essential Energy application should be denied — if we ever reach the end of this long, repetitive process.
It’s too late for timely, but denial is the only response 100% guaranteed to protect Archbald from a disaster that began as a fatally flawed concept.
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, has seen too many disasters born of flawed concepts. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky