Neighbors of a Secaucus data center say its generators filled their homes with diesel fumes all summer
Cordgrass Data runs the ten generators at its SEC1 site for monthly tests, during power cuts and, it confirmed, when the grid operator pays large users to come off the grid in a heat wave. The houses to the west get the exhaust.
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SECAUCUS, N.J. — On the afternoon of June 24, in the worst heat of the year, a retired school custodian who lives a few blocks west of the Cordgrass Data center on the edge of the Meadowlands shut every window in her house. It did not help. “You could taste it,” she said. “Like standing behind a bus.”
Both of the site’s utility feeds had failed at 1:41 p.m., and SEC1, a data center that rents space to companies for their servers, had switched to its own generators. They ran for four and a half hours. At 3:12 p.m. one of them caught fire, according to the company’s own report on the day, which it published in July. Nobody was hurt.
Residents say June 24 was only the worst of it. Complaints to the neighbors’ line that Cordgrass runs rose to 19 in the second quarter of this year, from three in the same quarter of 2024, according to figures the company publishes. The Overseen interviewed 14 people who live within half a mile of the site; 11 said generator exhaust had come into their homes or yards this summer, several more than once.
Data centers keep diesel generators to carry them through power cuts, and test them every month. Several residents said tests at SEC1 often ran on what sounded like every engine at once, at times that varied from month to month. Others noticed runs on hot afternoons when the power had not failed.
Asked about those runs, Cordgrass confirmed that SEC1 takes part in a program under which the regional grid operator pays large electricity users to switch to their own generators when demand peaks in a heat wave. It said the program helps keep the grid stable. It did not say how much it is paid.
A Cordgrass spokesperson said the company was reviewing how and when it tests its generators and would write to neighbors “in the coming weeks.” The company says its sets meet the conditions of their state air permits.
Cordgrass markets SEC1, which opened in 2015, as built above the flood line, and its generators sit on raised plinths. The houses to the west sit lower.
Update, : Cordgrass announced changes to generator testing at SEC1, including fewer sets per test, a fixed monthly time and its withdrawal of SEC1 from heat-wave demand response. It said residents “were right.”