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Buffalo, WV Residents Hold Town Hall Tonight on Google's 1,700-Acre Data Center — the Ohio Valley's First Organized Hyperscale Fight
WV
Data Centers / Community Opposition / HB 2014
April 24, 2026
Source: WV MetroNews
A town hall meeting convenes at Buffalo Town Hall tonight at 6:30 PM to coordinate opposition to Google's proposed 1,700-acre data center in Putnam County. The site is roughly 2.7 square miles — about twice the area of New York City's Central Park (843 acres). The meeting was organized by Pliny resident Heather Ransom and follows Google's March move on the acreage — tracts straddling both sides of Route 62 in Buffalo, chosen for the 765-kilovolt Appalachian Power transmission line (a high-capacity bulk-power line, the largest class of transmission in the eastern U.S. grid) running through the property and its position opposite the Toyota manufacturing plant.
Putnam County Commission President Andy Skidmore told the April 14 commission meeting — where residents spoke publicly about the project for more than an hour — that the available acreage could accommodate “up to four data centers.” At hyperscale class (typically 500 MW each), four buildings would represent roughly 2 gigawatts of committed load — comparable, by our calculation, to the annual generation of multiple Three Mile Island reactors (see Methodology for the conversion).
Ransom's stated concerns for tonight's meeting: “the lack of transparency, the potential financial burden, and then of course the health and environmental impact from various types of pollution.” Google has said the company will cover infrastructure costs for water, sewer, and electrical transmission.
The enabling statute matters. The project is proceeding under HB 2014, the Power Generation and Consumption Act, the West Virginia law that created the state's “certified microgrid program” — a state designation that allows large electric loads to be served by dedicated on-site or nearby generation, exempt from some standard utility-regulation procedures, specifically to attract hyperscale data-center siting. HB 2014 gives the county commission 30% of revenue from projects sited on certified microgrid sites — meaning the county's financial interest in the project and the county's regulatory authority over the project are the same institution.
Buffalo sits on the Kanawha River in the heart of the Upper Ohio Valley (Putnam County population approximately 57,000, per Census 2024 estimates). This is core Ohio Valley geography — roughly 60 miles south of Wheeling, 90 miles upriver from Huntington — and the siting decision will set the practical template for every subsequent hyperscale proposal in West Virginia.
What You Can Do
Tonight (April 24)
6:30 PM at Buffalo Town Hall. Open to the public. This is the first organized opportunity for the community to shape the record on the project before formal permitting milestones. If you live in Putnam, Kanawha, Mason, or Jackson County — or anywhere downriver — the comments made at this meeting will be cited in future proceedings.
If you can't attend tonight
Submit written comments to the Putnam County Commission at the county commission office, or contact Heather Ransom (the organizer) via the town hall organizing network for next-meeting updates. WV MetroNews is actively covering the organizing; follow the station for future public-meeting announcements.
Understand the statute before you speak
HB 2014 (Power Generation and Consumption Act) is the enabling framework for every hyperscale siting decision in West Virginia going forward. Read it. The bill text and the Public Service Commission's implementing rules are posted at wvlegislature.gov and psc.state.wv.us. The 30% county revenue share is structural — the statute says what the county does and doesn't control.
Contact the sponsors and committee chairs
HB 2014 passed in 2025 and can be amended in future sessions. Residents concerned about the siting framework itself — not just this specific project — should contact their state delegate and senator, and the chairs of the House and Senate Energy committees, before the next legislative session opens in January 2027.
If you live outside West Virginia
Watch this meeting and the Buffalo project closely. HB 2014 is the most explicit state-level hyperscaler-enabling statute in the country; if the Buffalo project moves forward on schedule, it becomes the model other states cite. The procedural dynamics tonight — how a county of ~57,000 people processes a 1,700-acre, multi-gigawatt land-use decision under a statute that aligns the county's fiscal and regulatory interests — will be the case study.
Community Takeaway
The Ohio Valley has not had an organized hyperscale fight before. Rural broadband, pipeline easements, cracker plants, coal retirements — yes. A 1,700-acre Google-branded data-center campus on the Kanawha River with up-to-four buildings' worth of siting capacity — no. Tonight is the first moment the community organizes around that fact.
Three things make this siting different from a typical industrial project in the valley. First, the scale: 1,700 acres (about twice Central Park) with transmission-line topology that was selected precisely because it can accommodate multiple hyperscale buildings. Second, the statute: HB 2014 routes the siting approval through a local body whose revenue share is tied to the project's existence, which is a structural conflict the statute creates and that no amount of public comment at tonight's meeting can undo. Third, the water: Buffalo's watershed carries the long-documented C8/PFOA contamination history from DuPont's Washington Works plant; any consumptive-use increase from data-center cooling enters a surface-water context that is already contested.
A hyperscaler operating at Buffalo scale on Kanawha River water, under a 30%-revenue-share statute, with transmission already in place, is a template. Whatever happens tonight is the first data point on whether the template is applied quickly or slowly — and whether the valley's long history of hosting other people's extractive infrastructure acquires a new chapter or finally forces a different conversation. West Virginia's zoning authority structure and HB 2014's enabling framework are state-specific; verify how this interacts with your own state's siting process before assuming it transfers.
Source: WV MetroNews, April 24, 2026.