Draft air permits for 645 diesel generators tied to an Amazon data-center project entered public review in Richmond County. Amazon seeks approval for 588 emergency units, while Duke Energy proposes 57 temporary generators until permanent grid service is available. Amazon plans a 21-building, $10 billion data-center campus and applied for permits covering 588 emergency backup generators.
Duke Energy seeks to place 57 leased portable generators at the site during construction and testing for less than a year. Amazon Web Services, not Duke ratepayers, would pay for the temporary bridge-power units, according to a Duke spokesperson. Amazon said each building requires backup power for cloud customers that include hospitals, utilities, first responders and national-security agencies.
Amazon estimates its backup generators would normally run five to 15 hours a year for testing and maintenance. Draft permits allow up to 500 hours annually per backup generator, a regulatory ceiling higher than the company’s expected use. Residents and environmental groups said many community members did not understand the type or scale of the project during earlier economic-development proceedings.
State regulators said air-dispersion modeling kept projected pollution below health-based standards beyond the property line if permit conditions are followed. The Division of Air Quality can issue, modify or deny the permits after reviewing testimony and written comments.
The evidentiary boundary at publication is specific: The permits are drafts, model results depend on compliance and operating assumptions, and actual generator use cannot be known before construction and grid connection. The current account therefore distinguishes completed events from announced, proposed or still-contested steps. Statements by governments, companies, litigants and advocacy organizations establish what those parties said; they are not treated as independent proof of every underlying assertion. Numerical values describe the source period and category identified in the reporting and may be revised by the responsible institution.
The next public records expected to update this account are the hearing officer’s recommendation and final permit conditions and monitoring data, construction schedules and the date permanent grid power becomes available. Until those records appear, the dates, totals, procedural posture and attributed descriptions above are the latest checked account for the July 31 edition. A later filing, official release, verified field report or corrected dataset could change a total or timetable without erasing the documented sequence at this cutoff.