This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Cherokee County residents held a protest in front of the Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corporation Tuesday evening to demand transparency around the member-owned electric cooperative’s potential plans to build a new data center.
Community members found out about the project, which has not pulled permits or begun construction, through talking to utility workers who were putting survey flags on property near Grape Creek Road in a rural part of the county. In late October, community residents along Grape Creek Road held a meeting at the Grape Creek Baptist Church, which was attended by local officials. Now, they’re organizing online and turned out a small group to the front doors of the cooperative on Tuesday night, for what they thought would be the utility’s monthly board meeting. Regional environmental advocacy group MountainTrue helped organize the protest.
That morning, however, the group found out the meeting date had been moved to Nov. 17, according to resident Katherine Taaffe. They still showed up, but were not happy.
“To me, it just elevated an issue about transparency, that a membership co-op should probably be more transparent,” said Taaffe, a resident of Murphy since high school.
In videos shared by MountainTrue Organizer Donovan Green, Blue Ridge Mountain EMC CEO Alan Glidewell was met by irate protesters outside the cooperative’s building. Glidewell said the data center question was not his to decide.
“It’s a board-level type of thing, so I’d suggest you put that in front of them,” Glidewell told the protesters in the video.
“We weren’t given any notice that anyone was going to be on our property or doing anything to our property,” said resident and enrolled Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians tribal member Marc Kephart later in the conversation. He became activated when he saw the survey flags begin to go up in a utility right-of-way that’s on tribal land. According to Kephart, any changes of this nature would have to go before the tribal government for approval. “My property’s on the reservation and we got a moratorium,” he said.
According to The Asheville Citizen-Times, Glidewell told protesters the electric cooperative cannot choose which customers to serve, and that the meeting date had been changed two weeks ago.
Taaffe told BPR the group will reconvene at the Blue Ridge Mountain EMC meeting’s rescheduled date next Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday of this week, Cherokee County commissioners convened a special meeting to discuss a high-impact land use ordinance to limit data centers. The proposed new regulation has been in the works for a while. The county had issued a moratorium on cryptocurrency mines in 2023, and extended it for a year. It expired in 2025.
At the meeting, commissioners examined whether the county could institute another moratorium until the ordinance can be finalized, since the original moratorium did not fully take data centers into account. County attorney William Bulfer told commissioners at the meeting that another moratorium could open the county up to a lawsuit, because the company behind the data center could interpret the moratorium as being targeted specifically towards them. The county will further examine the issue at its usual meeting on Nov. 12, at which Glidewell is also expected to speak.
