Melissa Clarke: How to manage the explosive growth of data centres has become a key community concern and a political battle. The Queensland and Northern Territory governments have rejected a national plan to force data centres to use renewable power. Now a stoush brewing over how to regulate water use. Here’s political reporter Lexie Jeuniewic.<\/p>\n
Lexie Jeuniewic: Australia’s new wave of data centres will be hungry for power and thirsty for water.<\/p>\n
Murray Watt: If we don’t put in place some standards early in the development of this industry, we do run the risk that data centres become a large user and drainer of our water and that’s what we want to avoid.<\/p>\n
Lexie Jeuniewic: Murray Watt is the Federal Water Minister. Today he’ll meet with his state and territory counterparts to seek agreement on proposed national standards for large data centres.<\/p>\n
Murray Watt: That would include for example a requirement that data centres minimise their water use, that they prioritise water efficient technologies, non-drinking water and recycled water. We also want to make sure that data centre proponents are paying their fair share for water infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Lexie Jeuniewic: In Sydney alone the forecasts are telling. Sydney Water says last year data centres consumed less than 1% of the city’s drinking water. By 2035 that figure could rise to as much as 25%. Senator Watt is hoping all ministers land on the same page, but he’s bracing for some pushback to the national plan from Queensland and the NT.<\/p>\n
Murray Watt: Look I’ve been speaking about this to each of the individual ministers and I think it’s reasonable to expect that Queensland and Northern Territory may take a similar approach to the approach they took regarding energy where they didn’t sign up to these standards.<\/p>\n
Lexie Jeuniewic: Large data centres use water to cool servers and chips, but how much they use varies.<\/p>\n
Danielle Francis: Like any other customer, like a business or a factory or a shop or a shopping centre or a hospital, they have connections into the water main system.<\/p>\n
Lexie Jeuniewic: Danielle Francis is Manager of Customer and Policy for the Water Services Association of Australia, the peak body representing urban water utilities.<\/p>\n
Danielle Francis: What we’re looking for is, particularly in places that are looking for large amounts of water, we’re going to try and supply that with recycled water so they would get a connection to a recycled water pipe.<\/p>\n
Lexie Jeuniewic: Kane Thornton is the Head of Strategic Impact at CDC Data Centres, which operates 19 data centres in Australia. He’s also the former head of the Clean Energy Council and is supportive of the government’s national approach.<\/p>\n
Kane Thornton: There obviously is some devil in detail to work through, but I think at the end of the day I’m hopeful and confident that we’ll get to a landing whereby those regulations and expectations will really drive industry towards the better practices.<\/p>\n
Lexie Jeuniewic: The outcome of the Water Ministers’ meeting today will inform the upcoming meeting of National Cabinet, with the aim of introducing legislation for the rules to Parliament early next year.<\/p>\n
Melissa Clarke: Lexie Jeuniewic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melissa Clarke: How to manage the explosive growth of data centres has become a key community concern and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":855334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,425550,63,36974,2458,1772,4358,51328,2322,13404,59642,3755,6895,105,11814,221402],"class_list":["post-855333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-aus-pol","tag-australia","tag-australian-politics","tag-data","tag-data-centres","tag-drought","tag-fed-pols","tag-federal-politics","tag-murray-watt","tag-pm","tag-podcast","tag-prime-minister","tag-technology","tag-water","tag-water-usage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}