A $2.8 Billion Data Center Beat Its Lawsuit in Spartanburg County. The Power Plant Behind It Never Went Before the Board That Reviews Power Plants.

Alva Pack has lived on Spring Lake Drive in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, for 44 years, directly across from a stretch of old industrial land. Until last year, he says, that meant quiet. "It was peace and quiet and tranquility and no dust or dirt on our front porch, back porch and decks until NorthMark came in," Pack told Fox Carolina in July. He has asthma, says his breathing is already labored, and now mops his decks every week, something he never did before. What moved in across the street from him started life in county records as "Project Moc-1." The number attached to it was 27 permanent jobs.

Not a data center, residents were told

That's not what got built. Project Moc-1 turned out to be Valara, a $2.8 billion data center campus on South Pine Street. The 27-job figure never captured what the site actually needed: a private natural gas power plant, 11 turbines generating somewhere between 408 and 457 megawatts depending which filing you read, built specifically to run the computers rather than draw that power off the public grid. A Valara attorney later put the real construction workforce at 1,500. Former county council member David Britt told residents early on, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center's account, that the project "was not a data center and would not use more power than the site's existing facility." Neither claim held up, and the gap between what residents were told and what got built is the clearest case yet for why GridPermit's Kill Test asks for the filed permit and the agency's own description of a project, not just the developer's.

The loophole that mattered more than the zoning fight

South Carolina's Utility Facility Siting Act is supposed to put any power plant over 75 megawatts in front of the Public Service Commission for the kind of public review a coal or nuclear plant would get. Valara's turbines clear that bar several times over. On August 27th, the PSC ruled the Act doesn't reach this plant anyway, because it "will not export power generated to the electric grid for public use." It's self-generation, built behind the meter, for one customer. The Southern Environmental Law Center argued the statute cares about the size of the plant, not who buys its output; the commission disagreed and dismissed the challenge. The result is a plant several times the law's own threshold that never got the review the law was written to require, not because it's small or clean, but because of how it's wired. Oracle ran the same play in New Mexico last month, powering Project Jupiter's data center with on-site fuel cells specifically to skip the interconnection queue instead of a siting board. Different agency, same logic: generate your own power, and the rules written for power plants stop finding you.

A lawsuit dismissed, not decided

Concerned Citizens of Spartanburg County and SELC separately sued over how the county reviewed Valara's zoning, arguing the project was a major land development that never got the scrutiny the label requires. On October 6th, Judge J. Derham Cole Jr. threw the case out, but not on the merits. He ruled the neighbors should have appealed to the county's own Board of Zoning Appeals within ten days before going to court, and that their complaints about noise, dust, traffic, and transparency were too general to show the specific harm South Carolina law requires before a neighbor can sue. Whether Valara actually violated the county's zoning ordinance was never reached.

The judge has basically found that if you're a neighbor of this massive power plant, you don't have the right to be in court to challenge it.Catherine Wannamaker, senior attorney, Southern Environmental Law Center

SELC says it will appeal. A second Valara permit application, covering four more buildings, a power yard, and added cooling systems, is still pending before the county. Construction on the existing phase hasn't paused for a day, and the $2.8 billion is still going into the ground regardless of how the appeal turns out.

The part the state actually got right

Here's the genuinely good news in this file. While SELC was fighting the zoning case, it also caught a real error in Valara's air permit. The Department of Environmental Services had calculated the plant's controlled formaldehyde emissions at just under 10 tons a year, the threshold that triggers stricter federal major-source rules. SELC's own math put the real number at 10.58 tons, and DES ultimately agreed its original estimate had leaned on an emission-reduction technology Valara isn't actually using. Rather than bury that, the agency adjusted the permit before issuing it on September 18th: a hard, federally enforceable cap under 10 tons for any single hazardous pollutant, under 25 tons total, and a new requirement that Valara run additional formaldehyde testing once the plant starts operating, a real-world check nothing in the original filing required. SELC still wants the state to reopen public comment on the corrected numbers, a request DES hasn't publicly answered as of this writing, and that's a fair ask. But a regulator that catches its own mistake and tightens a permit in response, instead of letting a bad number quietly stand, is the system working the way it's supposed to, even late.

What Spartanburg does next

The county isn't only litigating. Amid the emissions dispute, Spartanburg officials traveled this month to Virginia's Loudoun County, the oldest and most built-out data center market in the country, specifically to see how a jurisdiction with a decade's head start handles monitoring and oversight of projects like this one. That's a county admitting, in effect, that it was out of its depth the first time and doesn't want to be the second.

I think the lawsuit's dismissal is the least important thing that happened in Spartanburg this month. Procedural dismissals get reversed on appeal more often than people expect, and SELC has a real shot at this one. What doesn't go away on appeal is the Siting Act ruling. Any developer in South Carolina now has a tested path to building a several-hundred-megawatt power plant that never sees the Public Service Commission, as long as the power stays behind the meter. That's the fact worth tracking, not whether one project's paperwork survives.

Valara will almost certainly get built no matter how the appeal goes. The investment is real, the turbines are already up, and nothing in the record suggests the county wants to stop it. The open question is whether South Carolina revisits what counts as a reviewable power plant before the next self-generation project shows up asking for the same exemption. On the evidence so far, nobody in Columbia is in a hurry to answer that.