New Jersey bill would make data centers report water use

New Jersey is moving to put data centers on a reporting clock. Under the proposal, owners and operators would have to submit semi-annual reports on water and energy usage to the Board of Public Utilities, or BPU.

The bill defines a data center as a facility whose main job is storing, managing and processing digital data, and it reaches the equipment that keeps those places running, from servers and network gear to cooling, fire protection and security systems.

A bigger footprint on the grid

The practical reason for the reports is straightforward. Data centers can pull a lot of electricity and water, and that demand does not stay inside the building. It can ripple out to utilities, ratepayers and nearby communities that live with the consequences of more intense resource use.

The measure is written to make that footprint easier to see. It also says it supplements Title 48 of the Revised Statutes, folding the requirement into New Jersey’s utility framework rather than treating data centers as an isolated category.

The numbers behind efficiency

The bill does more than ask for raw totals. It creates definitions for power usage effectiveness, water usage effectiveness, renewable energy factor, energy reuse factor and waste heat reused. Those terms are meant to show how efficiently a data center runs and how much of its resource use can be tied to the computing load itself.

Power usage effectiveness compares a center’s total energy consumption with the energy used by its information technology equipment. Water usage effectiveness does a similar job for water. The other terms track how much renewable energy is used and whether waste heat gets put to work outside the facility instead of being lost.