Report: Court Orders The Data Centers to Pay $1.4M to Contractors

Delaware Superior Court ruled in favor of three consultants that sued The Data Centers for unpaid fees and interest, leaving TDC liable for $1.4 million total, Delaware Online reported.

TDC was the developer behind the failed data center construction project planned in Newark, Delaware, that included a co-generation power plant. The company was going to build on a property that belonged to the University of Delaware, but the university terminated the lease with TDC after much opposition by residents in the surrounding community.

This was one example of a major data center construction project that didn’t happen because of community opposition. Another project is currently in danger of meeting the same fate in Haymarket, Virginia, where residents are protesting a plan by the local utility to build a new power transmission line to feed a planned Amazon data center.

The issue in Virginia has become so contentious, that two state legislators have written a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos directly, asking the company to consider alternatives. One of the legislators also proposed a new law that, if passed, could effectively block the project.

TDC has said it was looking for an alternative location for its project, Maryland being one of the options. The original plan was to build a large data center and a 279 megawatt combined heat-and-power generation plant that would power the data center and feed energy into the local utility grid.

Besides the two lawsuits against TDC by three contractors seeking to get paid for services they have provided, one of the partners in TDC has filed a lawsuit against another. In the lawsuit, former TDC president Robert Krizman claimed that CEO Earl Eugene Kern kept him in the dark about company business, while running up millions in debt the company couldn’t repay.

Two of the winners in the recent court ruling are engineering firm Duffield Associates and site project manager Constructive Management, which filed a joint breach-of-contract lawsuit against TDC, claiming the developer owed them about $1.39 million in unpaid invoices and interest. The third winner is Econsult Solutions, an economic consulting services company, which looked to recover about $18,600 plus interest from the developer.