Coal to Compute

A dead power plant, a beloved lake, and the fight over TeraWulf's Cayuga data center

Land Promised, Purpose Betrayed | In Other News

The Cayuga Power Plant sat quiet for six years after its coal fired generators went dark in 2019. Then, in August of 2025, Maryland based TeraWulf signed an 80 year lease for 183 acres of the site on the shores of Cayuga Lake in Lansing, New York, and told investors it planned to convert the old plant into a data center capable of handling up to 400 megawatts of digital infrastructure.

The company, which built its business mining bitcoin before pivoting toward AI hosting, framed the move as an obvious fit: existing high capacity electrical infrastructure, an existing water intake system built for cooling a power plant, and a workforce familiar with industrial operations. What it did not fully anticipate was how organized the response from Tompkins County would become.

A petition, a lawsuit, and a permit fight

By June of this year, a coalition calling itself No Data Center FLX had gathered more than 20,000 signatures on a petition asking the town of Lansing to reject TeraWulf's application, roughly 17,000 of them from New York residents. Organizers delivered the petition directly to Lansing's town board, citing risks to water quality, air quality, wildlife, and the health of surrounding wetlands.

"We ask you to reject TeraWulf's application due to the risk their project poses to water quality, air quality, wildlife, wetlands, electricity demand, and the health and well-being of surrounding communities."

That was Ken Wolkin, president of the advocacy group FLX Strong, addressing the Lansing Town Board this June. His organization, along with Cayuga Lake Environmental Action Now, has also pursued the fight in court, winning a ruling that allows their lawsuit against the town's Zoning Board of Appeals to proceed after the board classified the proposed data center as a permissible "general processing" land use, a classification the groups argue rewrites the town's zoning code by interpretation rather than by vote.

The water question sits at the center of the dispute. TeraWulf has repeatedly stated the facility will run on a fully closed loop cooling system using recirculated water and a food grade additive, not water drawn directly from the lake. But the site retains an active water withdrawal permit application, filed years earlier, to pull just over 1 million gallons a day from Cayuga Lake for what the company describes as an unspecified future use. County lawmakers, including geologist and legislator Judith Hubbard, have pressed the state's Department of Environmental Conservation to require a full new environmental review given how dramatically the site's purpose has changed, from coal combustion to high performance computing, rather than treating the permit as a routine renewal.

A regional pattern residents can already see

Concern in Lansing is sharpened by what has already happened at a comparable site 50 miles away. TeraWulf's existing Lake Mariner facility in Somerset, New York runs at nearly twice the capacity proposed for Cayuga, and residents near that site report a constant 95 decibel hum from cooling fans, roughly the noise level of a running lawnmower, audible day and night. For Lansing residents like Aaron Guilbeau, who lives near the proposed site, that comparison is not reassuring. He has told reporters he expects both his quality of life and his property value to suffer if the project proceeds as planned.

Union representatives and some local business leaders see it differently, pointing to roughly 500 temporary construction jobs and 100 permanent positions the company has said the project would generate, along with 400 million dollars in redevelopment investment on a site that has otherwise sat vacant and generating no economic activity for years.

The state backdrop

The Cayuga fight is unfolding just as New York enacts the nation's first statewide data center moratorium, the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a one year pause on state permits for facilities over 20 megawatts that cleared the legislature in June and awaits the governor's signature. Depending on how that law is implemented, it could directly affect TeraWulf's timeline, since the Cayuga project's proposed capacity sits well above the 20 megawatt threshold that would trigger review.

As one Lansing resident, Maushart, put it in comments to Inside Climate News, the community's underlying skepticism is not really about TeraWulf's specific promises. It is about who the company answers to when the promises are tested. She described the sense that a mega corporation with obligations to its own shareholders and customers is unlikely to prioritize the interests of the lakeside town it moved into.

A coal plant deserves a second chance. So does a lake that spent decades absorbing the costs of the first one. The unresolved question in Lansing is whether "coal to compute" is actually a story of industrial redemption, or simply the same extractive relationship wearing a cleaner name.

Sources: WBNG, Ithaca.com, Ithaca Voice, Inside Climate News, Cayuga Lake Environmental Action Now, Tompkins Weekly, Fingerlakes1.com, CNY Central, DLA Piper (New York moratorium coverage).