New Jersey environmental justice law won’t block power plant hotly fought by Newark residents

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — For nearly four years, residents of Newark’s Ironbound section, a gritty, industrial neighborhood near an airport and surrounded by train tracks and many smelly sources of air pollution, had hoped an environmental justice law aimed at protecting communities like theirs would block construction of yet another gas-fired power plant.

On Thursday, those hopes were crushed when New Jersey allowed the permitting process for a new facility to move forward. The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission says the $180 million backup power project is needed to prevent another power failure like the one from Superstorm Sandy in 2012 that allowed 840 million gallons of raw sewage to flow into New York and New Jersey waterways.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s decision was the first of its kind since 2020, when Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed the state’s environmental justice law with great fanfare. Although it is not the final step in the approval process, it represented a major hurdle for the project — and a major disappointment for neighborhood residents.

The new power project is designed to kick in during severe storms, power outages or cyber attack. Officials from the existing plant, the sixth largest out of 16,000 in the nation, say the backup power source will be a critical safeguard against raw sewage entering waterways, or even city streets, during a power outage.

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