NSW urged to freeze approvals for $41b data centre pipeline | AFR

Diesel generators on the roof of the DigiCo data centre on Harris St, Ultimo

'The City of Sydney called for “minimum performance standards for energy and water, flexible demand to reduce network impacts with full cost-recovery, and direct investment into the real-time supply of 100 per cent renewable energy”.

Data centres should be “grid-positive” through requirements for “direct investment in new solar, wind, and battery storage projects”, it said.

The deputy lord mayor of Sydney, Jess Miller, an independent on Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s team, went further, arguing in a separate submission that data centres amount to a “resource blockade of new housing”.

“Under the current first-come, first-served grid allocation rules, data centres are legally reserving massive amounts of power capacity that remain idle for years. This enclosure of the grid is making it physically and financially risky to deliver the 8000 new homes promised [in Pyrmont], as residential developers are being forced to fund multi-million dollar infrastructure upgrades that data centres have already exhausted.”'

READ MORE in the Australian Financial Review.