State Financial Help
New Jersey bill would make data centers report water use
The New Jersey bill also asks operators to spell out cooling energy, backup power and where their water comes from. Regulators would get a clearer picture of which facilities lean on the grid and local supplies.
New Jersey lawmakers are moving to make data centers report how much water and energy they use. The proposal would send those reports to the Board of Public Utilities and add efficiency metrics for centers that receive state financial help.
- Semi-annual reports would go to the Board of Public Utilities.
- The bill defines data centers broadly, including servers, cooling and security systems.
- It adds efficiency metrics for energy, water and waste heat.
- The goal is to make the facilities’ footprint more visible to regulators.
- New Jersey is moving to put data centers on a reporting clock
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.