Montville is being asked whether large-scale data centers should be allowed to be built here. We think the answer is no — and we’re organizing to make that case to the Township Committee.

What Is a “Hyperscale” Data Center?

When a developer looks at open land in a town like ours, they may see the site for a “data center.” That term sounds clean and high-tech, but it hides what actually gets built: a windowless, warehouse-scale complex packed with thousands of computers running every hour of every day, surrounded by the substations, transformers, generator yards and cooling equipment needed to keep them running.

It is not an office park and not a factory. Almost nobody works there. A hyperscale facility can draw as much electricity as a small city, and the costs of feeding it land on neighbors and on everyone else’s utility bill. The profits leave town.

Flyer: Do you oppose allowing data centers to be built in Montville? Come to the Montville Township Committee meeting September 8, 2026 at 7:00 PM, 195 Changebridge Road. No data centers — protect our community, protect our future.

Why Data Centers Are Bad for Montville

1. Every ratepayer helps pay for the power they demand

This is the impact most likely to reach your household, and it doesn't stop at the town line. Data centers bid into the same regional grid — PJM — that supplies all of New Jersey, and the cost of keeping that grid reliable is spread across every customer on it.

According to Monitoring Analytics, the independent market monitor for PJM, data centers accounted for $6.3 billion of the $16.4 billion in costs from PJM's most recent capacity auction — and $29.4 billion of $63.6 billion across the last four auctions. That most recent auction cleared at its maximum allowed price, while the grid still came up 6.8 gigawatts short of its own reliability target.

New Jersey households already felt this. The statewide supply auction that took effect June 1, 2025 raised average residential bills by roughly 17% to 20% depending on utility territory — an increase the Board of Public Utilities attributed largely to PJM capacity costs.

There's a second cost besides the power itself. Serving a load this size means building new high-voltage lines, substations and related infrastructure, and that construction is generally recovered from ratepayers too. Transmission projects can also require acquiring land or easements from private owners. Before anything is approved, the town should know what grid upgrades a proposal would trigger, who pays for them, and whose property they'd cross.

We want to be straight with our neighbors about what the research does and doesn't show. A Rutgers New Jersey State Policy Lab study looked at 2014–2024 and found no robust evidence that existing data centers had already raised nearby residents' bills by much. But its own title is "Mostly Not. Yet." — because that data predates the AI build-out. The facilities being proposed now are orders of magnitude larger, from hundreds of megawatts up to a gigawatt, and the transmission upgrades they require take years to show up on bills. The risk is ahead of us, not behind us.

2. You can't drink data

Servers generate heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. Many large data centers cool themselves by evaporating water — millions of gallons a year at the biggest sites — and they need it most in the hottest, driest stretches of summer, exactly when our wells, aquifers and reservoirs are already under the most stress.

How much water a specific facility would draw depends entirely on the cooling system it's designed around, which is why it matters that the town ask the question before anything is approved: What is the projected annual water draw? Where does it come from? What happens in a drought year, when residents are under watering restrictions?

3. Diesel backup generators and the air we breathe

A data center can't afford to go dark, so when grid power falters it switches to banks of on-site diesel generators — and those generators are also started and run regularly for testing. They emit nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter (PM2.5), the pollutants most associated with asthma attacks, respiratory illness and cardiovascular harm.

Researchers at Caltech and UC Riverside put numbers to this in "The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI". Their projection for the United States by 2030: public health costs of about $20 billion per year, and as many as 1,300 premature deaths per year (their estimated range is 940 to 1,590).

The generator piece alone is significant. The same researchers estimate that backup generators at Northern Virginia's data centers already create regional public health costs of $190–260 million a year — and that if those generators ran at the maximum level their permits allow, the figure would be roughly ten times higher.

The authors also found this pollution "disproportionally affects certain low-income communities," partly because of how close they are to the power plants and backup generators involved. And they make a point worth sitting with: a data center pays property taxes to the one county hosting it, but as co-author Shaolei Ren puts it, the health impact "travels across the whole country, so those other places are not compensated at all."

Their recommendation is that operators be required to actually report the air pollution caused by their power consumption and their generators. That's a reasonable thing for Montville to ask for up front.

4. Constant noise and light that never turn off

A data center is never idle. Cooling equipment, chillers and fans run around the clock, producing a persistent low-frequency hum that carries — the kind of noise that is difficult to muffle and difficult to escape inside your own home. Noise is among the most common complaints from residents living beside these facilities elsewhere.

Any specific facility's noise depends on its equipment and setbacks, which is why the town should require a noise study measured against Montville's own ordinance limits at the property line — not a developer's assurance that it will be quiet.

The same goes for light. These sites run high-intensity security lighting all night, which carries into surrounding neighborhoods, washes out the night sky and disrupts sleep for the people and wildlife nearby.

5. Big tax breaks, very few local jobs

Data centers are construction-heavy and staff-light. The building phase brings trucks and temporary work, but a finished facility is run by a small crew of technicians — a fraction of the employment you'd get from nearly any other use of a comparable parcel.

That's the trade to scrutinize: permanent changes to the landscape, traffic, noise and utility demand, in exchange for a handful of permanent positions.

The arithmetic gets worse if tax incentives or abatements are on the table. Towns elsewhere have granted very large exemptions to attract these projects, and these deals are often negotiated quietly, sometimes under non-disclosure agreements, so residents learn the terms after they're settled. The community keeps the traffic, the infrastructure wear and the utility demand; the company takes the profit elsewhere. Every number in that trade — assessed value, abatement, projected payroll — should be public before anyone votes.

6. It changes the character of the township permanently

These are not office parks. They are windowless industrial halls surrounded by substations, transformers, generator yards and security fencing, often several stories tall and lit through the night. Building them means clearing land and adding impervious surface, which pushes more stormwater runoff onto neighbors already dealing with it.

And it is effectively irreversible. Once a facility is built and connected, no future Township Committee is going to undo it. The moment to decide is now, while it is still a question.

7. Zoning decided in advance beats fighting each application

Where data centers are already a permitted use in a town's industrial or office zones, a developer may be entitled to build without ever making a public case for it, and residents find out late. Deciding the zoning question up front — before a specific application is on the table — is what keeps the decision in the community's hands.

We're not lawyers or planners, and we'd encourage anyone who wants the specifics of Montville's current ordinances to get them from the Township directly. But the pattern across New Jersey is clear: the towns that acted early had choices, and the towns that waited had lawsuits.

Montville Wouldn’t Be Going First

More than two dozen New Jersey municipalities have already voted to ban or pause data center development, and the reasons they gave are the same ones we’re raising here — power demand, water use, noise and quality of life.

Warren Township
Somerset County · ban approved 5–0, June 2026

Red Bank
Voted unanimously to ban data centers, June 2026

Asbury Park
Council called for a local and statewide pause, June 2026

Sayreville
Introduced an 18-month moratorium, June 2026

Others include Pemberton Township, Monroe Township, Millville, Andover Township and East Greenwich. Beyond New Jersey, New York’s governor signed a one-year moratorium on large-scale data centers in July 2026.

As Warren Township Committeeman Daniel Croson put it, “no single town can solve these issues alone.” But every town that acts makes it easier for the next one.

And this is not a fringe position. Gallup found that seven in ten Americans oppose building AI data centers in their local area, with nearly half — 48% — strongly opposed, and majorities against them in every party group. For comparison, in the same polling 53% opposed a local nuclear power plant. Americans are more resistant to a data center next door than to a reactor.

What We’re Asking For

  1. Keep data centers out of Montville — decided in the zoning code, not application by application.
  2. No decisions without public numbers. Any proposal should disclose its projected electricity demand, annual water draw, noise modeling and any tax abatement sought, in public, before a vote.
  3. Residents in the room. Township Committee meetings are where this gets decided. Showing up is the whole ballgame.

Get involved with Montville Rising

The Bottom Line

No community should have to trade away its clean air, its quiet, its water and its affordable utility bills to raise a tech company’s margins. What we’re asking for is ordinary: transparency about what’s proposed, fair utility rates, and a real say in how land in our own township gets used.

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