Data centers are rapidly reshaping New Jersey’s landscape, and not for the better. Massive, energy-hungry facilities are spreading across our state at an unprecedented scale. The result: rising energy costs, strained water supplies, loss of farmland, and communities left in the dark without transparency or meaningful input while billion-dollar Big Tech corporations move forward with little oversight and sweetheart tax deals.
New Jersey needs comprehensive data center laws and regulations now to hold these facilities accountable and mitigate impacts to ratepayers and the environment. What we have instead is a dangerous vacuum, and New Jersey communities are paying the price.
The New Jersey Sierra Club strongly believes that moving the five bills listed below forward will take a meaningful step in the right direction to start making data centers a properly regulated industry in the state.
Tell your legislators to support:
- S3379(Ruiz)/A4096 (Venezia): requiring facilities to report water and energy use,
- A3966 (Karabinchak) directing the state to study the long-term impacts of data center water consumption,
- S680(Smith) /A1170 (Danielsen), requiring all electricity from data centers to be derived from clean energy sources,
- S731(Burzichelli)/A796 (Bailey), requiring electric public utilities to develop and apply special rules for large load customers to protect non-large load customers from increased costs (ensuring big tech companies pay their fair share).
- S1857 (Tiver)/ A177(Fantasia): excluding farmland from definitions of "redevelopment area" and "rehabilitation area" in "Local Redevelopment and Housing Law."
Take action now by sending a message to move this package of bills that take the necessary steps to make data centers accountable for their impacts to our utility bills, taxpayer dollars, communities, and the environment!
