The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has opened an enforcement case against Core Scientific over emissions from backup generators at its artificial intelligence data center in Denton, according to reporting by the Denton Record-Chronicle.
City staff told the City Council about the case in a report on Friday, Oct. 30, the newspaper said. The state agency sent the company a notice of enforcement on July 24.
What the state found
The Record-Chronicle's account draws on a July 22 TCEQ investigation report. After the company found a manufacturing defect affecting 93 transformers at the site, it began running emergency generators, and the investigator later found that eight generators had run between April 9 and June 23, four of them during what the report treated as a non-emergency event.
Over those 11 weeks, the eight units put out an estimated 384.13 tons of nitrogen oxides, 50.10 tons of carbon monoxide and 2.51 tons of particulate matter, the paper reported. The site's certified yearly limits for the whole facility are 24.9 tons, 8.17 tons and 0.85 tons of those pollutants.
Generators are allowed 100 hours a year of non-emergency use under the authorization. Four units at one building logged between 1,352 and 1,371 hours, and four at another logged between 527 and 1,024, according to the report as described by the newspaper.
The notice also alleges that the company lacked a federal permit required for major pollution sources and did not keep complete records, and it says no emissions calculations were supplied for diesel fuel storage.
Denton County sits inside the Dallas-Fort Worth ozone nonattainment area, which federal regulators classify as severe.
