By Sean Brown and Warisa Somsuphangsri
Citizens of Tottenham
This is not a story about opposing digital infrastructure. It is a story about how a residential community came to be living next to one of the largest concentrations of diesel engine capacity in Victoria — without being consulted, without being notified and without any assessment of what it meant for the people who live here. And it is a story about what we think should happen instead.
What was approved without us
Two data centres with approximately 130 diesel backup generators, storing 2.4 million litres of diesel fuel. All of it within 500 metres of 2,603 residents, a kindergarten, a Maternal and Child Health clinic and a primary school. None of it was assessed for cumulative impact on the community alongside it. This is the reality people in ‘south West Footscray’ are living with.
In February 2021, NEXTDC CEO Craig Scroggie addressed the Maribyrnong City Council seeking approval for a data centre at 25–27 Indwe Street.
He described a company “extremely focused on our impact on the environment” that builds “solar arrays and wind farms” and uses “kinetic energy rather than batteries to provide power.”
He promised a building of “very sympathetic design for the local residents.” A previous proposal for the same site had drawn more than 80 community objections and was rejected. NEXTDC’s proposal drew five.
The capacity approved that day was 13.5 megawatts. What exists today is a 225-megawatt facility, seventeen times that scale, with forty confirmed diesel generators on site. This rises to more than one hundred if the current expansion is approved.
No solar arrays appear in any planning document. The growth from 13.5 to 225 megawatts happened stage by stage under the original council permit, without fresh community notification at each step.
The community in 2021 was objecting to something fundamentally different in scale from what has since been built. Residents on Indwe Street have installed white noise machines throughout their homes. One describes midnight as appearing like midday. Some residents compare it to Mordor.
A second facility compounded the problem. The Perri Melbourne Data Centre at 1 McArthur Street, approved in April 2025 will store 510,000 litres of diesel fuel and operate an estimated thirty-two backup generators. It is 190 metres from Kingsville Kindergarten and the co-located Maternal and Child Health clinic on Roberts Street.
The environmental risk section of its planning assessment contained one finding: that the site is not located within a bushfire prone area. Kingsville Kindergarten does not appear in that document. The MCH clinic does not appear. The community was barely consulted. Most residents did not know it was happening.
What we found when we looked
On 4 March 2026 we emailed the Minister for Planning Sonya Kilkenny about community concerns. One item read: “We are concerned about any further expansion on its current or nearby site. We ask to be informed of any proposals regarding this data centre as soon as possible.” Seven days later, the public notice for NEXTDC’s expansion application opened. The submission period was fourteen days. The Minister has never responded.
Citizens of Tottenham became aware of the application by chance. We lobbied the Department of Transport and Planning for more time – twice. We were given until 11 April, one week short of what we consistently requested, with most of the extension falling across Easter. In those thirty-one days, with no budget and no formal right of objection under the ministerial fast-track process, we produced a 37,289-word formal submission.
It identified Kingsville Kindergarten, the MCH clinic, and Corpus Christi Primary School as sensitive receptors that no planning document had ever named. It presented 153 days of community air quality sensor data showing localised pollution events on a roughly monthly basis. It compiled twenty-six power outage events over three years — a rate 4.8 times Jemena’s urban reliability benchmark — with each unplanned outage triggering diesel generator activation at a residential boundary 13.5 metres from the site. It estimated an illustrative community cost of between $73 million and $141 million across the operational lifetimes of both facilities. A cost that has never appeared in any planning document.
Prior to filing, Maribyrnong City Council lodged a formal objection. Katie Hall MP wrote to the Planning Minister supporting our central request: no permit until a comprehensive independent cumulative impact assessment is completed. More than 1,000 people signed our petition.
What we lost and what we want
We have lost ten hectares of industrial land less than ten kilometres from the Melbourne CBD, well-served by road and rail, in a municipality the Victorian Government has identified as a priority for jobs and economic development. This was genuinely valuable land — half of it is now a data centre. The other half is proposed to become more of the same.
What should have gone here:
- Genuine and effective buffers, not token set-backs, should have been mandated for this site. It is at the interface of industry and homes and this should have been recognised by planners and decision makers.
- Clean energy manufacturing – one of the fastest-growing industrial sectors in Victoria, actively seeking sites with exactly these characteristics.
- Grid-scale battery storage supporting the state’s energy transition feeding power back into the local network rather than drawing from it.
- Urban food production – controlled-environment food production, generating skilled local employment, serving growing demand for local supply chains, sitting comfortably alongside a residential neighbourhood in a way that a hyperscale data centre does not.
These are not theoretical alternatives. These are employment-generating industries that would have put local people to work in meaningful numbers, not the minimal operational staffing of a hyperscale data centre. These are uses that would have served Victoria’s economy and this community simultaneously. That opportunity is now substantially gone, approved away stage by stage, without the community ever being asked what they wanted their neighbourhood to become.
What remains possible is a different approach to what is still undecided. Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are commercially deployed in Australian data centres today. They respond to grid outages instantly with no diesel combustion, eliminating the routine generator testing that is the primary source of diesel emissions in non-emergency operation. For a company with a market capitalisation exceeding $8 billion, operating in an airshed the Victorian Government has formally identified as needing improvement, a BESS-primary solution is not an unaffordable alternative. It is a choice that has not been made and has not been justified.
Citizens of Tottenham have formally requested that the Minister initiate a West Footscray Precinct Planning Process — one that treats what remains of this opportunity as a single planning question, invites alternative proposals and requires mandatory community benefit obligations for any development approved here. West Footscray deserved that process five years ago. It is not too late to begin it now.
The decision is now with the Minister. Every level of democratic representation available to this community has asked her to pause and assess before deciding. We are ready to participate in building something better. We are asking the government to be ready too.
Sean Brown and Warisa Somsuphangsri are founding members of Citizens of Tottenham and Residents of West Footscray. The community submission is available via email citizensoftottenham@gmail.com
