By Peter Gartside
In February this year a company called CDC announced the construction of a data centre in Laverton ‘set to generate thousands of local jobs and inject more than $2.7 billion into the economy during construction’. Federal, state and local government representatives welcomed this seemingly impressive development.
Great news for the West, right? Well, maybe. Firstly, how many people know that there are already at least half a dozen data centres in our patch? In fact, pretty soon there will be four within a tight 3 km2 area in Maribyrnong, all close to residential areas. Behind the clean, anonymous, high-tech facades, what do we really know about data centres?
Not surprisingly, they use colossal amounts of energy. They are designated ‘required infrastructure’ and need major upgrades to the power network, including dedicated electricity substations. And once the electricity grid upgrade is undertaken, data centres will understandably tend to cluster, as is the case with the two that will soon be within 200 metres of each other in Tottenham. Then, if the upgraded grid fails, they each have their own diesel generators, and their own reservoirs of fuel. In the case of a new data centre recently approved for Sunshine Road, that means onsite storage of 510,000 litres of diesel.
Driving along Geelong Road, you can see several huge shiny generators at the back of the existing CDC data ‘campus’ at the corner of McDonald and Geelong Roads. Backup diesel generators at data centres need to be regularly fired up to keep them maintained, ensuring that the moment we get trucks off residential streets, their emissions are replaced by those from generators. Perhaps they aren’t quite so environmentally clean as the promotional material would have us believe.
Data centre servers also generate massive amounts of heat, so they need to be cooled using large amounts of water. CDC says they have developed a closed cooling system, meaning the same water is circulated. Of course, the heat drawn away from the servers needs to go somewhere – presumably upwards. At the time of writing, we await a reply from CDC on this and other questions.
Let’s look again at those claims of a boost to the local economy. Councils will certainly collect business rates, but, once built, data centres are not known for providing much in the way of employment. CDC has 14 data centres in Australia and New Zealand: according to their Sustainability Report they employ 350 people in total. Even assuming that all those people are employed at their sites, that averages just 25 staff per site. The car parks of these facilities are almost always empty.
So, ‘thousands of jobs’ and a ‘$2.7bn’ injection into the local economy? We’ve asked CDC to give us some detail on these figures. As local resident and air quality campaigner, Glen Yates, who has thoroughly researched data centre impacts told us: ‘These facilities are extremely energy hungry to run and require very little staff to operate, meaning no real benefit to the local economy’.
At the very least, we should know that data centres are already here among us, and that there will likely be more. Our elected councils should be able to decide whether these developments are right for our communities. The application for the data centre to be developed by PMDC on Sunshine Road went directly to the state government where it was fast-tracked, with Maribyrnong councillors only able to comment on a decision that had already been made elsewhere. Why the lack of consultation and openness, if data centres are indeed such great news for the local economy? Perhaps it would be wise to be sceptical of claims that they represent lots of good clean, environmentally safe jobs for the local economy.
