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.
Backward society
I’m sure they totally turned off those turbines right? So they keep getting fined each day 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
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.
$1.1M an hour right?
At least $1.1M a day right?
Not even $1.1M a week???
Break the law, pay a tiny fine
A measly mil?
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!
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.
That’s per generator, right?
Really? $1.1 million is nothing
If it’s punishable by a fine, it’s legal for a fee. We need jail time for CEOs, not paltry tickets
Fine per day, right? RIGHT?
Exponentially increasing per day is still up right?
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.
We need to stop fining and start taking away privileges. Sorry, you can’t buy/build any fossil fuels any more.
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.
Compounding fines. If they’re not gone in a week double it and fine them again. Continue until they’re removed.
This. They are installed without permit, they will be uninstalled without warning.
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.
