I live in Appalachia, which has been an industrial sacrifice zone for a century. Some of the dirtiest coal fired power plants in the USA are where I live, and it's the reason why I have a home nebulizer, and my children all have inhalers. My cousin died of asthma, on the steps of the emergency room. She'll always be 36 and beautiful.

Our air is often dirtier than downtown Manhattan, but I don't get AQI alerts because the state Dept of Env Protection doesn't track it. Can't release data on fine particulates if you don't have the data!

a third of the toxic air releases in 2014 from power plants, factories and other facilities came from just 100 complexes out of more than 20,000 reporting to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A third of the greenhouse-gas emissions reported by industrial sites came from just 100, too. Some academics have a name for them: super polluters.

Twenty-two sites appeared on both lists. They include ExxonMobil’s massive refinery and petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas, and a slew of coal-fired power plants, from FirstEnergy’s Harrison in West Virginia to Conemaugh in Pennsylvania, owned by companies including NRG Energy and PSEG. Four are in a single region — southwest Indiana.

Those power plants were going to be shut down, but instead, PJM is building new power lines (and coal-fired power plants) to meet demand from Virginia data centers that process nearly 70% of global digital traffic.

Appalachians' bodies—and lives—are the sacrifices that make it possible.

Look how dirty that is. That's the pollution from a powerplant dedicated to the PJM Interconnection, funneling electricity to the maw in northern Virginia. My babies are breathing this because of AI data center demand.

Nearby sits the 502 Junction substation, connected to those plants and a third one about 43 miles away via existing power lines, which will serve as a terminus for a western prong of the PJM plan for new lines that will extend to another substation in Frederick, Md., then south into Northern Virginia. The other two plants belong to the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. utility, which had plans to significantly scale down operations there to meet a company goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly a third over the next six years. After PJM tapped the company to build a 36-mile-long portion of the planned power lines for $392 million, FirstEnergy announced in February that the two plants will continue operating until 2035 and 2040, citing the need for grid reliability.

The wildest part? The owners are a secret. Not kidding:

Public Citizen ... urged FERC to require Longview to disclose the plant’s new upstream owners.

Tough to fight it when you don't even know who you're fighting. We're trying, though the local gentry at the state capital passed a law forbidding local government to object to data centers or their power plants.