By Patricia Hilliard • Hudson County Group
You may have seen them as you drive along major highways in New Jersey: big box warehouses that sprawl across the land. They seem to be popping up on farmland, but more of them exist in Camden, Essex, and Hudson County where there is access to major railroads and shipping ports. These big warehouses can be filled with groceries and electronics, but increasingly more of these buildings are huge computer centers that are flashing and buzzing with data.
There are various counts, because data center proliferation in New Jersey is not well tracked, but the consensus indicates our state has more than 80 data centers either built or well along in planning. Data centers like to be nestled close to big cities like Wilmington, Philadelphia, and New York. That puts New Jersey right in the path of development.
Ever since the 1970s computer revolution, data centers have been built to process information for banks, insurance companies and government. But with the increased use of online information and digital cloud services, the big boxes are humming with crypto investments, computer game playing, a universe of websites, digital photo storage, online shopping, and AI. They are getting larger, too: A 300-megawatt (MW) data center is planned for Vineland, NJ.
Data centers use lots of electricity, and they often need lots of water to cool the computers. “A typical 100 MW data center uses approximately 300,000 gallons of water per day for cooling—equivalent to the daily consumption of 2,600 households,” according to Tech Insider.
The DataOne data center under construction in Vineland would include “six 220,000-square-foot buildings to house servers and computing equipment,” making it one of the largest data centers in New Jersey, according to Wolf Commercial Real Estate.
Even if these data centers provide their own power for operation and cooling, they are still likely to churn out CO2, directly or indirectly, and create other problems for communities. If they use gas, it may be fracked, causing contamination of air and water where the gas is tapped and along its pipeline. The DataOne power source is not yet settled, but it will likely involve use of natural gas.
Elizabeth, Newark, Jersey City, Bayonne, and Secaucus are other sites that already have data center activity and are targeted for new data centers. Part of the problem is that towns that get these data centers often don’t know the full picture of what they’re allowing in. Data center developers find ways to conceal information through:
• Incremental building phases that don’t trigger broad review threshholds
• Claims of proprietary information for technical designs and cooling methods
• Limited disclosures during local planning board review
• Use of flexible zoning categories such as “light industrial” that don’t trigger full reviews
• Separate utility reviews for power consumption
• Shell entities that obscure the identity of the real developer
Data centers that guzzle water from lakes and aquifers could imperil water availability for surrounding towns and farms, especially during dry spells. Poor stormwater management design around these mammoth buildings could worsen flooding during a downpour.
There’s also the issue of the huge amounts of electricity the data centers will consume. Unless they bring their own electricity, they compete for grid-available supplies.
We all know that when something is in short supply, the price will go up. Data centers with a high demand for water and electricity are already sending prices climbing. It was a major factor in our state’s 20% electricity rate increase last year.
If you feel that prices are already giving you the squeeze, join Sierra Club and help “box-in” the big boxes so they don’t overwhelm our communities. Obviously, this industry needs to be regulated. A balance needs to be kept between fulfilling community needs and industry expansion.