This week, New Jersey ordered the operator of one of the East Coast’s largest planned data centers to pay a $1.1 million fine for secretly installing and operating gas generators in violation of the state’s Air Pollution Control Act.
Shouldn’t they also straight up close the place and arrest everyone who signed off on it?
Fines are just a cost of doing business. There needs to be criminal charges and real consequences on the people making the decisions, and shutting down those generators until they meet regulations.
Or the scale of the fine can be expressed as a percentage of the assets and revenues, to make the fines genuinely dreadful.
Never mind right sizing the fines. I keep operating from the assumption that we are dealing with largely reasonable people who have a bad take and are correctable.
Make guillotines great again.
No new taxea, no fines, no jails, straight to the public square guillotine with this level of malfeasance.
In many US states if you get caught poaching game, the equipment you used is often subject to confiscation - that includes the boat, 4x4 truck, etc. If you are walking down the street with a suitcase full of cash - police can simply confiscate it with no evidence of an actual crime. If you are not going to jail anybody at least get yourself 62 generators for free. Am I overthinking this?
Backward society
$1.1M an hour right?
At least $1.1M a day right?
Not even $1.1M a week???
Why not $1 trillion?
In other news, Nintendo wins $4.5M from some dude selling pirated games…
That’s per generator, right?
I feel that only 1 million is a fraction of what they would had to pay if they had to produce the certifications and documentations for getting the permissions for the 62 turbines
I’ll bet anything they budgeted for a fine and it was still cheaper than doing it the proper way. Whoever signed the paper to approve the install should be on the hook personally.
NJ should have Public Works seize all of the offending generators with NJSP as backup. No warning, no compensation. Corporate lawlessness like this needs to stop being profitable.
This. They are installed without permit, they will be uninstalled without warning.
When the law comes for little people, they call this civil forfeiture.
When the law comes for the bigwigs… we don’t have a name for that. Because it doesn’t go down that way.
Compounding fines. If they’re not gone in a week double it and fine them again. Continue until they’re removed.
We need to stop fining and start taking away privileges. Sorry, you can’t buy/build any fossil fuels any more.
I want the board / ceo to do prison time for shit like this, as well as the contractors that execute the illegal work
This here!
Cost of clean and legally installed energy = X
Cost of cheap gas turbines, don’t bother with permissions, plus a later fine = less than XThat’s a no-brainer.
Fuck this attitude. I could say Fuck Capitalism, but it’s possible to still make a good profit with X, so this is actually something worse than capitalism. Oh yes, a century of pathological, boundless greed encapsulated in tHe sToCk MaRkEt.
a century of pathological, boundless greed encapsulated in tHe sToCk MaRkEt
I’m pretty sure that is just describing Capitalism. Trade, Commerce, Profits, and Money all existed before Capitalism. The boundless greed and “line must go up” mentality is what Capitalism brings to the table.
the [62] “tractor-trailer-size” generators were “impossible to miss” and certainly were not there when inspectors last visited in December 2025.
Each one of the generators cost roughly $1 million. With shipping, installation, etc. the total was probably north of $100 million for these generators.
So, they were fined less than 2% of what it cost them to have these installed. Pocket change, indeed.
Tow the generators and impound them!
Donate em to Ukraine, these things sound perfect for temporary emergency energy relief after strikes on infrastructure.
Instead they’re allowed to run them while they apply for the permit they didn’t follow through on. What a fucking joke
“You have 30 minutes to remove your generator.”
“You have ten minutes.”
“Your generator has been impounded.”
“Your generator has been crushed into a cube.”
“You have 30 minutes to move your cube.”
Fine them one million a day until the generators are done. That should motivate them a bit more.
They were already in violation. The days should count from the day they were installed, or from the earliest day it was confirmed as not yet installed.
$1M on day 1, $2M on day 2, $4M on day 3, etc.
So just the cost of doing business in the end then.
Fine per day, right? RIGHT?
Exponentially increasing per day is still up right?
I’m sure they totally turned off those turbines right? So they keep getting fined each day right?
Does the order also include removing the gas generators, or is it just cost of doing business?
DataOne was given 45 days to apply for the permits or else cease operations, but they can continue operating the gas engines while seeking permits.
Absolutely ridiculous ruling
I’ve worked in construction most of my life and I always wonder how code enforcement will come down hard on small projects and do nothing about larger ones. This is a local government issue, and the locals write the laws….
Break the law, pay a tiny fine
Really? $1.1 million is nothing
You guys remember in I think Nice Dreams with Cheech and Chong where they put up the blue tarps over the plants and he acted like he was swimming?
I bet they start using tarps or building buildings around them to start hiding this kind of stuff.
