NC DEQ Opens Comment on Amazon $10B Data-Center + Duke Energy Air Permits in Richmond County

On June 26, 2026, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality announced a joint public hearing on air-quality permits for Amazon’s $10 billion Energy Way Tech Campus in Hamlet, Richmond County, and Duke Energy Progress’s associated combustion-turbine facility. Amazon seeks a Title V air permit for 588 diesel emergency generators; Duke Energy seeks a permit modification for 57 diesel engines to supply bridge power during construction. Public comment is open through July 31. The dockets expose a colony-pays-twice structure: Amazon’s campus sits in a census tract flagged as potentially disadvantaged (Channel A), while Duke’s ratepayer-funded power infrastructure is built to serve it (Channel B).

This is a permitting-and-cost-shift node in the data-center-pipeline lane, adjacent to the ratepayer fights in 2026-03-13–ppl-electric-pa-puc-275m-rate-hike-large-load-data-center-tariff and the moratorium wave (2026-06-23–lake-county-fl-commissioners-draft-data-center-moratorium-july-vote, 2026-06-18–citrus-county-fl-data-center-moratorium-holder-rezoning-denied). The diesel-generator air-permit angle connects to the EPA’s NSR “begin actual construction” rewrite (2026-05-13–epa-nsr-begin-actual-construction-proposed-rule) that lets datacenter construction precede air permits. The open lead: the environmental-justice overlay (disadvantaged census tract + 645 combined diesel engines) and whether public comment alters the permit terms.