Technology and AI
Data centres must file water and energy returns twice a year under a law signed on 27 August
By Staff Writer | 29 August 2026
New Jersey has enacted a disclosure duty on data centre owners and operators, and issued guidance telling municipalities how to negotiate community benefits agreements with developers. The guidance sets out prevailing wage and project labour agreement expectations.
The state approved S3379 on 27 August as chapter 75 of the 2026 laws. Its official summary is a single sentence: it requires data centre owners and operators to submit semi-annual water and energy usage reports to the Board of Public Utilities. The bill had been in the legislature since February and left it with very little opposition, passing the Senate 34 to 2 in March, the Assembly 76 to 3 at the end of June, and the Senate again 39 to 0 on concurrence the same day.
What has to be reported
The returns are twice yearly and the content is set out by the state as total energy consumption, the energy used for cooling as against the energy used for information technology equipment, peak daily water use, the sources of that water, and the on site and backup power supplies. The split between cooling load and computing load is the number that will interest anyone who has argued about a design assumption after the event, because it turns a modelled figure into a filed one.
Nothing in the disclosure duty limits what a facility may draw. It is a reporting obligation, and its practical effect is to build a public series where previously there was an estimate. That series will be available to the regulator, to objectors and to anyone negotiating with an operator.
The part that touches construction
The same announcement carried statewide guidance on community benefits agreements, sent to municipalities on 25 August through a local finance notice. It is written for the authority sitting across the table from a developer, and it covers how to evaluate the effect on local infrastructure, how to assess emergency response and infrastructure needs, and how to negotiate investment on the ground, from public infrastructure works and blight remediation through to schools and workforce development. It also states the labour standards the state expects, naming prevailing wage and project labour agreement requirements.
I am laser focused on driving down costs and making sure our state is more affordable. When it comes to data centers, we're doing that by putting power back in the hands of communities and ensuring data centers play by our rules
Mikie Sherrill, Governor of New Jersey
Three state bodies have set up technical assistance teams for municipalities negotiating these agreements: the economic development authority, the environmental protection department and the utilities board. A council with an application in front of it and no in house energy expertise can now ask the state rather than the applicant.
Where it sits in the sequence
This is the fourth of four measures announced in May. The others are already law. Legislation signed in July requires operators to bring their own clean generation and puts large loads into a separate utility rate class, so that the cost of connecting them is not spread across other bill payers. Between them the four cover what the operator pays for power, what it must disclose, what it gives the host community, and who builds it.
For anyone advising on a data centre scheme, the reporting duty is the one to diary. A semiannual return is a recurring obligation with a named recipient, and the first one filed sets the baseline against which every later figure is read. Where a development agreement contains energy or water performance undertakings, those undertakings are now measured against a document the operator has filed with a regulator, and that is a different evidential position from the one that existed a week ago.