Sherrill: ‘Towns can make their own decision’ on data centers

Por Debra Kahn — POLITICO – TOP Stories

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) is making her case against a statewide moratorium on data centers, pledging to enforce a new suite of regulations on the facilities even as state lawmakers introduce more bills to slow down their construction.

In an interview with POLITICO’s Energy podcast, she said she favored letting local governments make their own decisions rather than putting a blanket moratorium on the hot-button projects, as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) became the first governor to do in July.

“If they want a moratorium, there are certain towns where it’s probably not appropriate to build data centers,” Sherrill said. “There are other towns where it probably makes sense.”

New Jersey lawmakers have announced plans for more than a dozen bills on data centers so far this session, including one introduced last week that would put a six-month moratorium on data centers over 10 megawatts.

Sherrill, who campaigned heavily on energy bill affordability and froze utility rate increases via executive order on her first day in office, is trying to boost electricity generation to ease data center-driven supply constraints across the Northeast states’ shared grid. But she said state and local officials could negotiate effectively to manage data centers’ impacts. She signed two laws to that end last month: one requiring them to periodically report water and electricity usage to the state and another ending a two-year old, $500 million tax credit program to encourage their development.

“If corporations make all the decisions, look, it’s cheaper to just dump all of your pollution into the local river instead of treat it and protecting people,” she said, a reference to a diesel spill last week from a data center into a tributary of the Hackensack River. “That’s where government comes in.”

“We’ve built a new rate class for our data centers so that they don’t drive up costs for ratepayers,” she said. “We’ve made sure that they’re using good union labor, so they’re getting good jobs into the community. Community benefits agreements, so that towns can make their own decision.”

“If a data center says, ‘Look, this is what we’re proposing in this industrial park, and we’re also going to invest in your K-12 curriculum, or we are going to build a community center, we’ll do that,’ that’s something the towns can determine.”

Sherrill said she had discussed her state’s plans with Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D), whose state has the highest concentration of data centers in the world and last week announced new restrictions on them, including a ban on nondisclosure agreements and limits on the type of power generation they can use on-site.

She acknowledged Virginia is “in a very different space on data centers. In fact, I’ve been frustrated with Virginia because they’re sucking all the power out of PJM and seeing rates go up. But I think as Abigail’s taken her seat, she’s been very thoughtful about how she is going to approach data centers. I’ve talked to her about our data center plan and what she’s thinking of enacting there.”

Sherrill signed a law in April lifting the state’s moratorium on nuclear power. She sounded an optimistic note on the energy source, as well as on the Trump administration’s willingness to subsidize projects’ financial risk.

“When you look at the cost overruns in Georgia, much of that had to do with building a new full-scale nuclear power plant — that hadn’t been done in a generation — and finding the workforce to do that in rural Georgia. We don’t have that problem here in New Jersey,” she said. “Where the federal government needs to come in is to sort of build that economy of scale. The Department of Energy also has the ability to take on the fiscal responsibility for a lot of this and make sure they’re backstopping all the funding, so they take on the risks, so the states don’t have to.”

She added that she was planning to visit a company this week that’s deploying nuclear fusion technology developed at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “This new technology that could be almost unlimited power at no emission,” she said. “This is the kind of thing that government does when it works at its best.”

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories