West Virginia
Data centers are West Virginia’s new strip mines
West Virginia is now on the frontline of a national shift that most people won’t notice until it shows up in their own bills, water tables or the substation down the road. This goes far beyond the typical Appalachian tragedies people are used to ignoring. Data centers and bitcoin mines are remaking rural America the same way coal once did. They move into weak regulatory terrain, rewrite the rules in their favor, drain the resources that communities rely on and send the value somewhere else. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 37 states have modified tax codes and regulatory structures specifically to attract data centers, with billions in exemptions granted annually. But the pattern is clearest in West Virginia, where the script is old and the state has lived through every version of it.
There’s a familiar smell to the data center boom in West Virginia. It’s the same old rot that came with coal, but now it’s wired up and rebranded so people can pretend it’s clean. Coal took the hills, the streams, the air and young men’s lungs. You could see the damage from the road. Strip mining leveled ridgelines so flat you could land a plane on them. Slurry ponds sat above towns like loaded guns. Everyone knew what was happening even if they pretended not to.
Data centers are the same kind of extraction, only this time the corporations are hiding them behind fences, nondisclosure agreements and a lot of glossy PR about “upcycling” coal mines and powering the future. Local reporting shows Blockchain Power Corp. bragging about being the first industrial data center in the state, dropping five bitcoin mines into abandoned coal sites at Hazelton, Ben’s Run, Tunnelton, Miracle Run and Blacksville. They pull 107 megawatts of power to keep their specialized computers humming so a global ledger can update itself every ten minutes for people who will never set foot in West Virginia. One hydrocooling site alone sits on 200,000 gallons of water to keep stacks of machines from overheating so someone else’s balance sheet can tick upward. For all that, they employ only 44 people.
Strip mining used to at least throw a few hundred jobs at a county while it hollowed everything else out. Now, West Virginia is trading away water, land, noise and grid capacity for a workforce small enough to fit inside a school bus.
Strip mining used to at least throw a few hundred jobs at a county while it hollowed everything else out. Now, West Virginia is trading away water, land, noise and grid capacity for a workforce small enough to fit inside a school bus.
The sales pitch hasn’t changed since coal. But instead of coal barons in hardhats, there are executives in tech vests talking about “work ethic,” “perfect climate” and how there’s “an abundance of water in the Mon[ogahela River].” They say things like “we lighten the load on residential customers” while they pull megawatts off the same system everyone else is struggling to pay for.
The new Power Generation and Consumption Act, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey in April, is just strip mining written into energy policy. Morrisey and the West Virginia legislature built a special lane for these projects. Microgrids. Off-grid gas plants. Custom tax structures. Counties get 30% of the tax revenue while the state scoops the rest and the companies get their incentives. Local governments lost almost all power. There is no zoning, noise rules, light ordinances or land-use limits. If a data center wants to roar like a jet engine all night, that’s the deal. It’s the coal playbook, but this time the blast pattern is invisible. Instead of blowing the top off a mountain, you build a gas plant next to a town and run it 24/7 for server racks.
Tucker County is living this right now. A Virginia company wants to construct an off-grid gas plant between the towns of Thomas and Davis to power its own private data complex. People there are asking basic questions: Where is the water coming from? How much noise? What happens to the air? How many jobs, really? How long before they leave? They’re getting redacted permits and shrugs in return.
Mingo County is considering two more off-grid plants branded as the “Adams Fork Data Center Energy Campus.” Jefferson and Berkeley counties have another complex in the works. Fidelis wants to build in Mason County.
Data centers can use several million gallons of water a day, the same as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. In a lot of places around the country, residents already fight them over wells running low and rivers running hot. Harvard University’s electricity lawyers have already documented what common sense told everyone here a long time ago: When industrial customers demand more power, regular people end up footing the bill.
In coal country, we watched this cycle play out for a century. First came the promises of jobs, prosperity, schools and roads. Then came the exemptions. No local control; the state would handle it. The externalities that never made it into the press releases. Flooded hollers. Black water. Broken roads. Sick workers.
When the coal gave out, the companies left and the bills stayed. Now data centers are pulling cheap power and water out of the ground and shipping the value out of state in the form of bitcoin, cloud storage, AI training runs and corporate “efficiency.” Instead of company towns, there are company microgrids. Rather than coal dust, you get a constant low-frequency hum and diesel backups.
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The state knows exactly what it’s doing. You don’t strip local governments of zoning, noise control, and land-use authority by accident. It’s a modernized method of extraction. The same agencies that refuse to release unredacted permits are the ones writing the compliance rules. They hold the hearings, take industry testimony and call it public input, even when no one from the public has enough information to challenge what is being approved. The regulatory framework is built around the assumption that these projects must happen and that whatever collateral damage emerges can be managed later or ignored entirely. West Virginians keep being told the state is “open for business,” but what it means is that communities have been positioned as collateral.
There is also a political calculation under all of this. Lawmakers know that most of these sites break ground long before the public even hears about them. By the time residents learn where the water is coming from or how loud the turbines will be, the permitting infrastructure is already locked into place and the tax structure has been negotiated behind closed doors. And that’s the point: The process moves faster than the opposition.If the public wants answers, they are told to wait until the next comment period, by which time the project is too entrenched to stop.
West Virginians have been told their whole lives that they have to choose between being poor and in the dark, or selling themselves cheap to a jobs number that collapses under scrutiny. Data centers are being presented as permanent fixtures, but the industries they serve are some of the most volatile on earth.
Bitcoin can collapse in a single bad cycle. Artificial intelligence workloads spike and fall depending on capital flows and investor appetite. Corporate cloud contracts shift between hyperscalers every quarter. When the economics turn, these companies will not hesitate to walk away. A data center stays only as long as it can pull cheap power. When they leave, the economic floor drops out from under the town with no warning. A data center that no longer fits a global balance sheet becomes nothing more than a warehouse full of dead machines and a power hookup the utility still has to maintain.
People in this state carry the outcomes of past booms in their daily lives. School closures came after projections that never held. Heavy industrial traffic tore up rural roads that were never built for that kind of weight, and the counties hit the hardest didn’t have the money or manpower to keep up with the damage. Streams turned chemical when operators left and the cleanup passed to taxpayers.
None of this fades from memory, and it shapes how every new proposal is received. Any promise of economic renewal is measured against a long record of industries that took what they wanted — and left residents to manage the fallout.
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CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) – West Virginia Virtual Academy celebrated its second graduating class Tuesday at the Clay Center.
The ceremony featured a keynote speech and performance from West Virginia native and season six winner of America’s Got Talent’ Landau Eugene Murphy Jr., where he set out to inspire the class.
The class graduated 140 students, with eight earning a Promise Scholarship and 26 intending to attend college in the fall.
The academy’s director Doug Cipoletti said the virtual learning is about more than sitting behind a screen.
“Then we provide this [ceremony] where kids can actually come together and meet one another and build those relationships,” Cipoletti said. “So yes, we’re a virtual school, but there’s a lot more to it than just being behind a computer and I think that really shows today.”
West Virginia Virtual Academy is a K-12 school.
Copyright 2026 WSAZ. All rights reserved.
West Virginia
West Virginia Democrats have an open competition at the top of the state party – WV MetroNews
West Virginia Democrats have a competition for leader of the state party.
Teresa Toriseva, who currently serves as first vice chair of the West Virginia Democratic Party, says she is running for the top spot currently held by Mike Pushkin, who also serves as a state delegate from Charleston.
“This is not a civil war within the Democratic Party. On the contrary, the party is quite unified in message and in mission. And that’s what I found as I’ve been campaigning to run for chair, and I’ve never believed it to be more true,” Toriseva said on MetroNews Midday. “It’s an exciting time for what is a growing, robust opposition party.”
But, “There has been a call for us to prepare for the future better and differently than the past and one of those things that I’m going to be focusing on is building relationships with coalition members from groups that think like us, groups that want to work together with us, from labor to women’s groups to organizing groups that are on the ground doing the work, bringing messages to voters.”
Toriseva is a Wheeling attorney who ran in 2024 for state attorney general, losing in the general election.
Democrats, which used to be the dominant political party in West Virginia, now have almost 327,000 registered voters in the state, about 27% of the overall number of registered voters.
The Republican Party has more than 521,000 registered voters, about 43% of the total number.
Toriseva says Democrats have had a successful period of candidate recruitment that can serve as a base for revitalization.
“Democrats are back, and does that mean we’re going to look like we did a decade ago? No, it’s a new party, and we’re moving forward in a new way, but the future is going to look very different than the past,” she said.
Democrats, under the direction of their own bylaws and state code, are having an organizational meeting at 3 p.m. Saturday in Charleston. The meeting’s focus will be on the election of officers. The meeting will be broadcast to the public via wvdemocrats.com/live
Toriseva has worked alongside Pushkin as one of the top officers of the party for the past several years.
“It’s either have an election now or anoint the incumbent for four more years, and so I do think that elections are healthy, that competitive elections are a sign of a growing and robust party and I don’t think that it’s any indication of a civil war,” Toriseva said.
Pushkin, in response, agreed that anyone is entitled to run for chair and make their case to the members of the executive committee.
And he said the resurgence of the West Virginia Democratic Party has been the result of the hard work of county committees, labor organizations, women’s clubs, Young Democrats, grassroots activists, candidates and countless volunteers across the state.
“What leadership does deserve credit for is creating a plan, bringing people together around that plan, and providing the tools and support necessary to execute it. Our record-breaking candidate recruitment effort did not happen by accident,” Pushkin said.
He said party leaders developed an organizing strategy, held weekly recruitment calls, engaged county leaders and allied organizations, launched the first large-scale candidate recruitment texting program in party history and raised funds to cover filing fees for candidates willing to step forward and put their names on the ballot.
“The question before us now is not who gets credit. The question is whether we continue building on that momentum or allow ourselves to become distracted by internal disagreements while Republicans remain deeply divided,” Pushkin said.
“My focus remains exactly where it has always been: bringing Democrats together, supporting our candidates and taking the fight to Republicans every single day.”
West Virginia
More Mountaineer magic: Guzman’s walk-off single in 10th sends West Virginia to 6-5 win over Kentucky in regional championship – WV MetroNews
GRANVILLE, W.Va. — It was never going to be easy.
Not with the recent history in the Kentucky-West Virginia series, which consisted of four postseason contests decided by one or two runs across the last two years ahead of Monday’s meeting in the Morgantown Regional Championship at Kendrick Family Ballpark.
Sure enough, Kentucky strung together five straight hits with two outs in the eighth, including a three-run home run from Hudson Brown and a solo shot from Ethan Hindle to tie the winner-take-all affair at 5.
But West Virginia has consistently shown the ability to not waver, including one night earlier when it rallied with five runs in the ninth inning to knock off the Wildcats, 11-9.
This time around, the Mountaineers relied on pitcher Dawson Montesa in relief one day after a 122-pitch outing against Wake Forest. Montesa recorded a pair of pivotal outs in the top of the 10th inning, setting the stage for Armani Guzman’s walk-off single to center in the bottom of the 10th that gave WVU a 6-5 victory.
“That was fun. I couldn’t draw it up any better,” second-year WVU head coach Steve Sabins said. “Everything that you love about coaching and everything you love about players was on full display this weekend. It was cinema and had literally everything you can imagine. If you keep going and stick through adversity, then you can do incredible things.”
With the win, West Virginia (43-15) will play host to Cal Poly (39-22) in a best-of-three Super Regional series with the winner advancing to the College World Series. The Mountaineers and North Carolina are the only teams to qualify for a Super Regional each of the last three years.
Guzman’s single came off of Jack Bennett, who began his outing with 14 consecutive strikes and retired six straight Mountaineers over the eighth and ninth innings collectively.
“That was my third at bat against him,” Guzman said. “He got me to pop out on change-ups twice. That at bat, I wanted to see him deeper. I wanted to hit the ball as hard as I could and stay composed.”
The bottom of the 10th began with Brodie Kresser’s leadoff single against Bennett, who then missed with a full count offering to Ben Lumsden that put two on to start the inning.
Tyrus Hall then got ahead 2-0, but popped up a sacrifice bunt attempt for the first out.
Disappointment didn’t last long as Guzman got ahead 2-0 and hit a solid single that allowed Kresser to score the winning run.
It was another memorable postseason moment from Guzman, who a year ago was named MVP of the Clemson Regional.
“He likes the moment. He loves to win,” Sabins said of Guzman. “He’s probably the best athlete in the country. That doesn’t hurt him either. I love his makeup and mentality.”
Game 7 of the Morgantown Regional had a little bit of everything, including a bounce-back effort from Maxx Yehl.
The Big 12 Pitcher of the Year was knocked around and didn’t make it out the first inning Friday in what amounted to an 11-9 loss to UK.
This time around, he worked five effective innings and allowed one run on three hits. The southpaw struck out six without issuing a walk and was efficient, throwing 42 of 67 pitches for strikes.
“Grateful the coaches believed in me to give me the ball,” Yehl said, “and I was excited to get back out there and help the team win.”
After keeping UK (33-23) off the scoreboard in the top of the first, Yehl returned to the mound in the second the beneficiary of a 1-0 lead after a dropped third strike allowed Sean Smith to reach and Gavin Kelly to score from third. Kelly had doubled with one out off Wildcats’ starting pitcher Jackson Soucie.
Guzman’s speed was the biggest factor in WVU doubling its lead in the third.
He reached on a bunt single, stole second on a failed pickoff attempt, moved to third on Kelly’s groundout and crossed the plate on a Paul Schoenfeld groundout.
Brown’s solo home run off Yehl in the fourth allowed the Wildcats to get back to within one run.
Yehl induced an inning-ending double play off the bat of Owen Jenkins to end the top of the fifth and the Mountaineers put together their best offensive inning in the bottom of that frame.
It began with Guzman’s double to left, which was followed by Kelly’s base-on-balls and a run-scoring single from Schoenfeld.
Matthew Graveline made it a three-run margin later that inning when he doubled to plate Kelly.
Kelly’s solo home run in the sixth — his third of the regional and 16th this season — left WVU with a 5-1 advantage. He was named Most Valuable Player of the Morgantown Regional.
“It’s a team MVP. It’s unreal the stuff that everybody on this team did,” Kelly said. “Everyone on the team deserves that. We have a team full of MVPs. It’s hard to kill when you have that.”
Ian Korn made that lead hold up until the eighth despite retiring the first two batters of that inning. Tyler Bell prolonged it with a single, Luke Lawrence followed with another and Brown belted his second long ball of the night to bring UK to within one run.
“We weren’t trained at any point throughout the year to ever think we’re out of a game,” Brown said. “Coach always tells us to keep fighting.”
Hindle made it back-to-back home runs, at which point Korn was lifted for Chansen Cole.
Cole allowed a single to Braxton Van Cleave, but struck out Tyler Cerny to end the inning.
In the ninth, Cole issued a leadoff walk to Carson Hansen, but he was stranded at second.
Kentucky then made consistent hard contact against Cole in the 10th, including several foul balls by mere inches that otherwise likely would’ve gone as extra-base hits.
With Cole and Hindle involved in a lengthy battle, Sabins elected to pull Cole mid at-bat in favor of Montesa, who entered with the count 1-2.
Montesa ultimately walked Hindle, which left Kentucky with runners at first and second and one out. But the right-hander, whose velocity was in the high 90s, followed it up by striking out Van Cleave and got Cerny to fly out to left for what wound up Kentucky’s final at bat of the season.
“I was like I don’t know if we have something left in the tank to get this dude out,” Sabins said. “We might be standing here watching the next pitch as a Wildcat crosses home plate. We rushed Montesa. It wasn’t exactly a genius move, but it ended up playing out well.”
Montesa recorded his second win in as many days by recording the last two outs of the 10th.
Guzman led WVU and all players with three hits.
Brown drove in four of his team’s five runs.
“I would think anybody that watched our team play would have to respect what we’ve been able to do,” UK coach Nick Mingione said. “Not an easy place to play like anywhere on the road in our league, but anybody that follows baseball, I really believe they would say we have gained a lot of respect.”
The third largest crowd in Kendrick Family Ballpark history of 4,607 took in the instant classic.
“It’s been cemented that this is the best college baseball atmosphere in the country,” Sabins said. “Nowhere can provide the energy that just happened in Morgantown. The place was absolutely electric.”
All-Morgantown Regional Team
C: Matt Conte, Wake Forest
1B: Armani Guzman, West Virginia
2B: Gavin Kelly, West Virginia
SS: Tyler Bell, Kentucky
3B: Tyrus Hall, West Virginia
LF: Ben Lumsden, West Virginia
CF: Javar Williams, Wake Forest
RF: Braxton Van Cleave, Kentucky
DH: Luke Lawrence, Kentucky
P: Chansen Cole, WVU
P: Dawson Montesa, WVU
Regional MVP: Gavin Kelly, WVU
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