Mega datacentre planned for outer Melbourne in Victoria

A datacenter has been planned for construction in Plumpton, about 30km north-west of the Melbourne CBD. News of the project had already spread through social media and news reports, which sounded the alarm before the company had begun its communication efforts.

The proposed site is 350 hectares, of which Syncline says 40% – 140ha, or just under six times the size of Chadstone shopping centre – will be used to house four datacentre buildings with maximum capacity of 2.4GW, with the remaining 60% to be open land. It therefore is larger than any currently operating in Australia and would consume more electricity than is generated by Victoria’s largest power station, Loy Yang A.

The sheer scale of the project has alarmed residents before shovels have hit the ground, building on a growing deep discomfort with the explosion in datacentre construction. An April report by lobby group Data Centres Australia said there were 30 datacentres in operation in Victoria, with another 30 in the pipeline.

A petition calling on the state government to “ensure the environmental, cultural, social and infrastructure implications of the proposed Victorian AI Hub are fully assessed and publicly considered,” as well as the cumulative effects of other new datacentres, has amassed over 3,600 signatures. It was started by Molly Walker, who works in conservation, saying that the scale of the project made her think “enough is enough” on how the datacenter is going to damage the environment.

Much of the community anger about the wave of datacentres in development has stemmed from a lack of community consultation, and through fast-track approval processes that skip the lengthy council review to go straight to the state government.

The managing director of Syncline Energy, Phil Galloway, says the company is carefully consulting with locals before submitting the planned application for the Plumpton site. Ecological surveys and cultural heritage work is being undertaken parallel to the community discussions, Galloway says, adding that locals need to be shown there will be no noise, heat island, traffic, ecology issues or pollution, “which means careful engineering, architecture and urban planning”.