Senate panel backs bills targeting New Jersey data centers
A data center underconstruction in Utah. Utility and interconnection officials have cited power-hungry data centers as a major cause of growing demand for electricity. (Photo by)
A Senate panel approved another series of bills meant to reduce the impact of electricity prices that are set to soar on June 1.
The bills, which cleared the Senate Environment and Energy Committee in divided votes Thursday, would raise data centers' share of electricity costs, boost construction of energy storage, and create an automatic approval process for residential solar projects, among other things.
Environmental groups hailed the data center legislation, which would create a separate rate-setting process within the Board of Public Utilities for data centers with maximum monthly demands of at least 100 megawatts, forcing them to pay for increases in energy costs as a result of data center load.
'This bill would not only provide an incentive for data centers to drive consumption down, but it would also protect ratepayers from shouldering the unfair burden of the cost,' said Jay Weisbond, a policy assistant for the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters.
It would also require rates for data centers to include cost recoveries for transmission or distribution infrastructure needed for their operation. The separate rate-setting process contemplated in the bill would take effect one year after its passage.
Utility and interconnection officials have cited power-hungry data centers as a major cause of the growing demand for electricity.
Electricity prices are spiking as demand that had been largely level for decades surges, and New Jersey's in-state generation has faced stumbles as offshore wind projects set to deliver thousands of megawatts fail or are blocked by federal regulatory authorities.
Republicans have blamed Gov. Phil Murphy's wind-heavy renewable energy agenda and the shuttering of existing fossil plants for auction-driven price spikes set to arrive June 1, while Democrats have sought to lay the increases at the feat of PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for New Jersey and 12 other states. Assembly Democrats are particularly anxious about rising utility bills, as all 80 Assembly seats are on the ballot this year (Democrats hold a majority in the chamber).
Separate legislation would require quarterly reporting on data centers' energy and water usage.
Business groups opposed both bills, warning they would push data centers into other states, including those on the same grid as New Jersey,
'We can't entice data centers to locate in New Jersey if we're going to continually be putting roadblocks in the way or making it more expensive or problematic to develop here in New Jersey,' said Ray Cantor, deputy chief government affairs officer for the New Jersey Business and Industry Association.
Murphy and legislators have sought to encourage AI development in New Jersey, including through tax credits, hailing it in July 2024 as a 'transformative industry that will change lives and grow our economy.'
The state would be better served by boosting electricity supply than by targeting large energy users, Cantor said, adding that manufacturing plants and even hospitals could run similar loads.
Though some suggested expansions, witnesses were broadly supportive of a bill requiring the Board of Public Utilities to procure and incent large-scale energy storage projects, which store energy produced at times of low demand to ease strains on production when demand is high.
Storage projects could start operating in the short term and would more quickly affect prices than other types of generation, they said.
'It doesn't have to wait in line for PJM Interconnection, which we know takes years. It can be interconnected locally. It can be permitted locally, so it's the fastest way to build,' said Lyle Rawlings, CEO of Advanced Solar Projects Inc. 'These projects, we're not talking about 2029 or 2030, we're talking about 2026 that these can be brought online.'
Separate legislation would require the Department of Community Affairs to create an online permitting platform to algorithmically approve residential solar projects. Municipalities could use the platform or set up their own automated solar approval system.
Supporters saw it as another method of quickly standing up new energy supply.
'Local solar can be a critical tool in meeting our energy needs, but only if we need it. While large-scale solar projects are important, they are often facing multi-year delays in the PJM interconnection queue. Local solar, on the other hand, can be rapidly deployed,' said Elowyn Corby, mid-Atlantic regional director of the Vote Solar Action Fund.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Vance reference to Alex Padilla as ‘Jose' during LA presser sparks Dem backlash
Several California Democrats slammed Vice President Vance after he referred to Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) as 'Jose' during a Friday presser in Los Angeles. 'I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question,' Vance said, referring to Padilla's forcible removal from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press conference last week. 'I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn't a theater,' he continued. Democrats railed against Vance for misnaming the state's first Latino senator, who the vice president served alongside before his successful White House bid. 'Calling him 'Jose Padilla' is not an accident,' California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a Friday post on the social media platform X. Newsom also urged Vance, who spoke about the governor's response to unrest sparked by mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the region, to make remarks to his face during a debate, instead of online or during public events in a later post. While Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) echoed the governor's concerns, she cited potential racial undertones in Vance's remarks. 'I guess he just looked like anybody to you, but he's not just anybody to us. He is our senator,' Bass said during a Friday presser. 'Mr. Vice President, how dare you disrespect Senator Alex Padilla like that? You serve with him in the Senate right now. You know him,' Bass wrote in a post on X, referring to the vice president's role as president of the upper chamber. However, Vance's spokesperson said the mix up was an innocent mistake. 'He must have mixed up two people who have broken the law,' Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance told reporters on Friday. But Padilla's colleagues aren't buying it. 'JD Vance served alongside Alex Padilla, and knows better. He's taking this cheap shot to distract from the real fear and havoc this Administration is creating,' Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote in a Friday post on X. 'It's pathetic.' The vice president's visit to Los Angeles came a day after a federal appeals ruled President Trump could retain control of the California National Guard in response to the protests. Both Bass and Newsom have encouraged the Trump administration to remove the National Guard and Marines from Los Angeles, arguing the city is safer without federal forces. Democratic lawmakers have continued to question the conditions detained illegal immigrants are being held under as well as law enforcement's use of physical force against protesters and members of Congress seeking to conduct oversight of immigration operations. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Ro Khanna: Democrats lost 2024 because they became the ‘party of war,' overlooked inflation
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) blamed the Democratic Party's poor performance in the 2024 election on unpopular positions on foreign policy and ineffective messaging on inflation in an interview with POLITICO. Khanna said in an interview on 'The Conversation' with Dasha Burns that Democrats became 'the party of war' by standing with Israel amid the country's ongoing war in Gaza. 'I think the Gaza situation really hurt us with a lot of young people, certainly in Wisconsin and Michigan,' Khanna told POLITICO. 'We would have won those two states, but for that.' Khanna, who has represented the San Francisco Bay Area since 2017, also pointed to his party's failure to take decisive action on supply chain shortages and other causes of rising prices as a key factor in Democrats' failure to woo voters. 'We were too late in recognizing how much people were hurting,' Khanna said in the interview, which was taped Wednesday and is set to air in full on Sunday. 'We kept calling it transitory. We didn't have the urgency of a plan of what we were gonna do to tackle inflation.' Khanna also weighed in on Elon Musk's recent fallout with President Donald Trump and whether the Democratic Party should welcome the billionaire back into its fold. Khanna served in the Commerce Department for the Obama administration, and he said that administration helped Musk's SpaceX secure key federal contracts to compete with industry heavyweights like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Musk also wrote a testimonial for Khanna's 2012 book 'Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future,' calling the future lawmaker 'a leading thinker on how to make U.S. manufacturing more competitive across this country.' But Khanna, who has known the former DOGE leader for over a decade, told Burns 'I don't recognize what happened to him,' condemning the Tesla CEO for politicizing the recent assassination of a prominent Democratic state lawmaker and her husband. 'The far left is murderously violent,' Musk wrote in a June 14 post on his social platform, X, reposting a commenter who erroneously claimed that the left was responsible for the Minnesota shooting and was a 'full blown domestic terrorist organization.' Khanna said Musk has 'done so much damage' — but credited him for criticizing the GOP's advocacy of stiff tariffs, harsh crackdown on international students and proposal to deepen the U.S. deficit by about $2.8 trillion over the next decade. 'My hope is just that he's not going to continue to enable an extreme agenda that hurts innovation, which is what the Trump administration has pursued,' Khanna said in the interview.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
'He knows my name': Sen. Alex Padilla reacts to Vance calling him ‘José Padilla'
Vice President JD Vance called California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla by the wrong name during a visit to Los Angeles Friday. Padilla shares his reaction to Vance's error with The Weekend. "He knows my name ... It's just an indicator of how petty and unserious this administration is," Padilla said.
