When state inspectors visited a dusty construction site amid the farmland of southern New Jersey in late July, it was impossible to miss the 62 tractor-trailer-size generators powering one of the largest planned data centers on the Eastern Seaboard.
None of the 2,000-killowatt natural gas-powered generators had the required permits to be installed or to operate at the site. On Tuesday, New Jersey fined the data center’s operator, DataOne, $1.07 million for violating the state’s Air Pollution Control Act. The fine is the largest ever issued to the operator of a data center in New Jersey, state officials said.
Hyperscale data centers, like the one in Vineland, are built to serve the needs of global technology companies. These data centers are racing to find power faster than utility companies can build grid capacity. As a result, some data center developers are installing off-grid power sources, drawing more backlash from the public.
“This is not a free ride for anyone,” Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey said at a Climate Week discussion hosted by Heatmap News in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday. “If they want to engage in building this out, it has to be a benefit to our communities in New Jersey.”
The data center campus in Vineland, slated for completion at the end of the year, will be a 2.6 million-square-foot complex requiring 350 megawatts of power, enough to power a medium-size city. Some of the complex is already in use, and it has been a magnet for complaints, beginning with the zoning process.
A group of homeowners has filed a federal lawsuit against DataOne citing persistent noise from the site. The Cumberland County Health Department has issued violation orders to DataOne for excessive noise.
DataOne said that it disagreed with the state’s decision. “We will apply for the air permits for the temporary generators,” a spokesman said in a statement, adding that the company was transitioning to low-emission, quiet fuel cells.
State officials on Tuesday ordered DataOne to immediately apply for the required permits and to stop using the generators if the permits are not approved within 45 days. Permits are required for any generator with 37-kilowatt capacity or higher, state officials said. The capacity of the generators at the Vineland site was about 50 times greater than that.
Natural-gas generators emit carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and other combustion-related pollutants. The complex is near farmland, homes and two schools.
Zac Landicini, a lifelong Vineland resident and the founder of Sustain SJ, an environmental advocacy group, said on Wednesday that he raised the question of unapproved generators at a public town hall meeting in February after a farmer first spotted “some type of unit” on satellite imagery of the site.
It’s unclear why nearly six months elapsed between that meeting and the inspection visit on July 29 that led to the $1.07 million fine announced Tuesday. The generators had not been seen during the previous site inspection in December, officials said.
In late August, an investigation by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom focused on environmental reporting, and The Guardian found that at least 45 of the 62 generators were running.
“It’s a ‘don’t ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness later’ kind of deal,” Steve Brown, a longtime Vineland resident, said in describing how he believed the data center operated.
He said Wednesday that he did not think a fine, even a record fine, would serve as much of a deterrent. “It’s still kind of a drop in the bucket for a company that has several billion dollars of capital,” he said.
Tiffany Leone-Vespa, a mother of two teenagers who has lived in the neighborhood for 18 years, said she was concerned about air quality.
“What have we been breathing in since they’ve been running these generators without permits?” she said on Wednesday, after picking up her children from school. “What emissions were released? What’s the air quality surrounding this neighborhood? Has it ever been measured?”
She was critical of the state’s penalty.
“What’s $1.07 million?” she said. “They should have done it for each generator they were running, illegally. They’re billionaires. It’s like pocket change.”
Last year, Virginia fined Microsoft nearly $2.5 million for operating 62 “emergency engines” for a week at a data center in Leesburg, Va., after an electrical substation failed. Virginia officials found that the data center exceeded its permitted emissions limits for pollutants. The fine was the state’s largest civil penalty against a data center.
Leesburg is in Loudon County, which says it has the world’s largest concentration of data centers, with more than 250. At least two dozen more are in the pipeline there.
The data center in Vineland, about 40 miles southeast of Philadelphia, has an agreement to provide artificial intelligence computing power to Microsoft.
Governor Sherrill said on Wednesday that data centers need to invest in the state’s power grid, report their water and energy usage and bring benefits to communities. She said that data center operators had been “horrible” at engaging with communities during the building process.
“That’s why I think you see so many people not trusting innovation right now, or where it’s going,” she said. “Because government needs to protect people from these downside risks. And right now, I would say, the federal government is not going to do it, which is why, as a state, we are engaging so aggressively.”
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