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Welcome back to New Jersey Power and Politics. 5 decades in the making, an Ocean County Beach community will join with its next door neighbor. Seaside Park officially voted this week to annex South Seaside Park from Berkeley Township. Residents fought to join Seaside Park. The reason why they did that was again services were not what they should be. They wanted to be part of a local community. Over the course of the next 60 days, it will be determined exactly how that separation occurs. If a decision can't be reached, a settlement too, a judge will appoint a 3 person panel to do it. Governor Sherrill signing into law a bill affecting hemp products and growers. Beginning in about 2 weeks. You'll only be able to buy them at certain liquor stores or dispensaries that have a license. This follows a federal crackdown on hemp, which comes from cannabis plants but is not nearly as intoxicating. As marijuana, the governor also signing legislation affecting nurse practitioners. The law no longer requires every nurse practitioner run practice to have a doctor on staff. It allows nurse practitioners to prescribe medications independently. AI is making life more expensive in some cases. Data centers drain the power supply, driving up electric rates. Eric Landskroner talks to NJ policy perspective about a new report on this very topic. I'm joined by Peter Chen, senior policy analyst over at New Jersey Policy Perspective. Peter, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Listen, this is a pretty familiar refrain that these AI data centers are absolute energy hogs. The Question is, in your research, how bad is it? What did you find? So by 2030, it's estimated that data centers will take up 10% of New Jersey's power consumption. Um, that's as much as most counties in the state, um, and that'll put a huge drain on New Jersey's resources, um, and requires serious policy measures to try to counteract that. Interesting. One of the bullets that I saw in your report was that these centers consume as much as as much energy as 100,000 households. Yeah, that's right. Um, you know, some of the smaller centers that New Jersey already has are more about like the backbone of the internet. But with these AI data centers, uh, the costs are quite large and the, the centers themselves are very large, you know, the Vineland Center itself that's being, uh, built right now, uh, could be up to 350 megawatts, which is a huge amount, uh, and certainly more than the rest of the town. Now, these don't just consume electricity, they consume massive amounts of water too. Talk, talk about the impact there. Yeah, I mean, not just certainly water which they need for cooling, but also the pollution that's created by these centers. You know, oftentimes they have backup power generators, and that's putting air pollution into the in the atmosphere and, you know, putting a lot of communities at risk that are already at higher risk for asthma and other chronic health conditions. Much of the blame for the rate hikes we've seen, especially last summer as we entered the summer, it was placed squarely on PJM. How much of the burden does PJM share versus the data centers themselves, or is it just a perfect storm that's coming together? I think a perfect storm is a great analogy here. Um, the rapid growth in AID data centers has put, uh, a lot of pressure on energy production. PJM has, uh, not been fast enough in trying to adjust and has maybe approved a lot of these projects to get connected to the grid without sufficient power, um, to ensure that, that, uh, cost isn't going to be passed on to other ratepayers, you know. Up to 70% of the increase in the PJM prices is due to data centers, and that's from PJM's own analysis. Governor Sherrill actually talked about data center regulation in her budget address a couple of weeks back. Can you weigh in on what the administration should be doing to prevent New Jerseyans from bearing the brunt of these centers' energy needs going forward? Yeah, so we have a number of, uh, recommendations in the report, um, including creating a standardized definition of what a data center is, uh, as well as additional guardrails on these projects to make sure that they report how much energy and water they're using, um, that they bring their own clean energy, so they're not bringing more, uh, gas and fossil fuel powered, uh, power plants that are spewing more pollution into the atmosphere. And to make sure that we start standardizing, um, forecasting for our grid, um, to make sure that companies can't shop around to different states to try to find the most favorable conditions, um, and instead have, you know, a pretty standard approach across the PJM system. So one of the points you made right there was actually one that the president made during his State of the Union address. He had announced a ratepayer protection pledge from major tech companies Amazon, Google Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle to build or to fund their own power generation for these data centers. Should that be the bare minimum if they want to open up shop in New Jersey based on how much energy they consume that they should be producing their own? Yeah, certainly a bring your own clean energy approach is one that we support, um, and again, focus on the clean energy piece, um, bringing in a bunch of gas-powered and diesel-powered power plants, uh, is not going to make communities healthier, um, and it's even if it provides the electricity for these, uh, centers. And one thing that we should also be looking at is removing or restricting the subsidies that the state is offering to data centers. There are about 10 states that offer that have lost more than $100 million every year to subsidies for data centers, and there's no reason certainly for New Jersey to join them, um, especially as we face our own budget crunch. It seems like based on your report and based on everything that we've seen and experienced as ratepayers that the primary recommendation here is that the time to act is now before things keep getting worse. Yeah, and we're going to have another capacity auction this, this year, um, and that will likely result in additional rate hikes. And if we're not taking action now, we're going to be seeing the effects not just this year, but into the future as this industry continues to grow. And it's important. To also consider these uh data centers at the local level, you know, uh, making sure that we're seeing a fair permitting and appropriate ordinances, make sure that these, uh, data centers are not burdening communities. Peter Chen from New Jersey policy perspective. Peter, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Eric, thank you. Stay with us. There's more to come on New Jersey Power and Politics.

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RTNJPowerPolitics04042026CBlock230pm_2026-04-04-15-20-03

Maybe it's the honeymoon, new numbers on how Governor Sherrill is doing so far. A Fairleigh Dickinson University poll shows nearly 60% approve of how she's doing, much higher than how Governor Murphy went out. FDU also asking about her clashes with President Trump. This too a big part of her first weeks in office, but about 40% say she should try to work with Trump. Dan Casino runs the FDU poll. Dan, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. What do you make of the governor's approval numbers? Look, Governor Sherrill won election with double digit margin. It's not surprising she's popular. This is more popular though than either of the previous last couple of governors were when they came into office. You know, Chris Christie and Phil Murphy came in with around 50% or a little bit more, so 58% is a significant improvement on that. We're really seeing here is partisan polarization. Democrats, liberals, progressives all giving her almost 90% support and even some support among Republicans, about 22% approval, and I think that's because she hasn't done a whole lot to upset people yet. And I think when we get into the budget and we start making hard choices, that's probably going to change. She's teed off largely on President Trump. Should she continue to do that? Well, she ran for office saying she was going to fight President Trump, but New Jersey voters are telling us in this poll that they really do want a pragmatic approach to it. 41% say that she should work with Trump, and interestingly, about a quarter of voters, 26%, say that she should work with Trump sometimes, that it depends. This wasn't even an option we gave them, and the fact that so many people just volunteered the fact they want her to sometimes work with Trump, I think shows the level of pragmatism among. New Jersey voters, and that's actually higher among black and Hispanic voters who seem to be much more interested in getting results. It's really only about 30% of voters, about half of Democrats and liberals who say no, she should be defying Trump, working against Trump basically no matter what. You guys also pulled her record budget proposal. The Rutgers football team, hundreds of millions in the hole since joining the Big 10, is making news out of that. How so? Well, so the Rutgers football team is one of only 3 teams in the Big 10 that gets support from the state, and the idea that they're getting money, you know, direct taxpayer money from the state, in addition to, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in student fees and money from Rutgers University, you know, voters don't like that. That's in fact, the one budget cut we could find where voters were pretty. Behind 67% of voters in New Jersey say we should stop paying for Rutgers football with tax dollars and maybe that would be different if they were doing a little better than 22 to 84 in conference play since they joined the Big 10. The Rutgers football team uniting New Jersey. Dan Casino of Fairleigh Dickinson University, thanks for joining us here on Power and Politics. Thanks for having me. And thank you for joining us this week. I'm Nick Meanni. Eric Landskroner will be back next week. You've been watching New Jersey Power and Politics.

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President of Chamber of Commerce Tom Bracken and New Jersey Policy Perspective Peter Chen join the show this week.

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