Foxglove and South African housing movement challenge new hyperscale data centre over critical gaps in water, energy and environmental information!
Formal objection argues City of Cape Town cannot approve 160 MVA hyperscale facility when developer Equinix has provided no information on water consumption, diesel emissions, air pollution or environmental impact.
Campaigners have launched an objection to a new hyperscale data centre, citing concerns over critical information gaps in the land use application laid before city authorities in Cape Town by Equinix, the US-based multinational that operates more than 260 data centres in over 70 cities worldwide.
The challenge is brought by the Housing Assembly (HA), a social movement representing over 20 communities in the Western Cape of South Africa, and Foxglove, a tech justice non-profit based in the UK. Legal counsel in this case is the Legal Resources Centre, based in Cape Town.
The objection argues that the land use application by Equinix – which is part of a wider scheme to build a 160 MVA data centre facility – should be refused for consideration by the City of Cape Town in its current form because it has failed to provide large amounts of essential information required to meet the threshold from which it can be properly assessed by city authorities.
Equinix’s plan is to build the new data centre at an industrial development called King Air Industria (KAI). The owner of the land is King David Golf Club, which has leased the land to developers, who are developing the site in several phases.
HA and Foxglove state that instead of a serious and comprehensive application package, Equinix have asked the City of Cape Town to change land permissions as part of a multi-stage planning process: “on the basis of a 24-page motivational letter that says nothing about water, nothing about emissions, limited on electricity, nothing about diesel generators, nothing about air pollution, nothing about noise, and provides no plans for the buildings themselves.”
The parties behind the objection note that sufficient information to make a decision about the data centre’s change in land use must be provided by Equinix on each of the areas listed above yet is currently either absent or incomplete.
Of the critical information gaps listed in this objection, the specific lack of detail on the water demands for a new data centre in the Western Cape is particularly troubling. As HA point out, Cape Town has suffered serious historic problems with water scarcity, with their members literally watching taps run dry during the “Day Zero” crisis in the previous decade.
The failure of Equinix to provide any kind of substantive detail on the new data centre’s water consumption in their land use application not only renders it impossible for it to be properly considered by the City of Cape Town but is also arguably a serious insult to everyone who has suffered through this water scarcity in the recent past.
HA and Foxglove have asked the City authorities to decline to consider Equinix’s application in its current form and instead to use its statutory powers to compel the data centre developer to fill in the critical knowledge gaps that exist in the application.
In accordance with local laws, KAI and Equinix will be given 30 days to offer a response to the objection. The City of Cape Town must make a decision on the application within 180 days calculated from the date the applicant responds to the objection.
Earlier this year, a legal case brought by Foxglove forced the UK government to U-turn on its plans to force through construction of a new hyperscale data centre without proper consideration of its impact on the environment. The UK government conceded that failing to ensure mitigation measures, designed to remove the need for an environmental impact assessment, where legally binding, was “a serious logical error”.
The energy consumption of data centres in South Africa’s pipeline dwarf existing capacity in the country. The ten largest data centres currently in operation (=278 MW) account for less than the single 400 MW proposed in eThekwini and new investment announcements indicate that there will soon be more hyperscale data centres – with large-scale energy and water requirements – joining the country’s digital infrastructure boom.
Housing Assembly spokesperson, Kashiefa Achmat said: “While hundreds of thousands of families in Cape Town remain trapped in unsafe and overcrowded conditions and in informal settlements, waiting for decades to access land and housing, new commercial developments continue to be prioritised over people’s basic needs.
“As the Housing Assembly, we are making it clear: this is a political choice. We cannot accept a system where land is allocated for profit while people are left without homes, clean water and electricity. The City must choose to put people before profit and ensure that land use decisions meaningfully respond to the housing emergency facing Cape Town. Another Data Centre, placing huge strain on the City’s limited energy and water infrastructure is not a priority for the landless people of Cape Town.”
Foxglove co-executive director Rosa Curling said: “There is a global fightback underway against new data centres bulldozing through legal guardrails designed to protect communities from harm caused by these power and water-guzzling monsters.
“In the UK, we forced the government to U-turn on its plan to force through a data centre with no concern for the damage it could do to our environment and plans to combat destructive climate change.
“We’re proud to be working with our partners in Cape Town to tell the city authorities to hit pause on this data centre, until Equinix supplies the full details needed to assess the impact on critical supplies of water and power, on the environment and air quality, and on housing.”
Legal Resources Centre Regional Director, Sherylle Dass said: “The City has a constitutional and moral obligation to prioritise access to land, housing and basic services, yet too often its planning decisions reproduce inequality rather than redress it.”
Notes for editors
Copies of the Housing Assembly/Foxglove submission to Cape Town city authorities are available on request.
Terms in this release:
MW vs MVA
Documents in the land use application in this case use both MW (megawatt) and MVA (megavolt-ampere) to describe the electrical demand of data centre developments. For that reason, this release also cites both measures it’s important to note they are not directly interchangeable.
MW measures real power – the energy consumed by the facility. MVA measures apparent power – the total load on the electrical grid, including reactive power required to operate transformers and other equipment. The two are related by the power factor, which varies by facility. Each development is described in the unit used in its own application or planning documents: MVA where the source material refers to grid connection capacity, MW where it refers to energy consumption.
“The developers”
“The developers” is used as shorthand in this release for the various entities involved in the King Air Industria data centre development, including Equinix, the KAI lessee/developer (whose name has been redacted from the publicly available planning application, Case ID: 1500156580), and any associated or affiliated parties. The use of this collective term reflects the fact that the identity of the specific applicant has not been disclosed in the public record.
Further context and info for editors
The objection comes at a time of increased scrutiny on the construction of data centres around the world. In the US, legislators in Maine recently passed the first statewide data centre ban in response to growing pushback across the country to the rapid rollout of infrastructure underpinning the build-out of AI.
South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced during the February 12 State of the Nation Address that more than 55 data centres have been built in the country with a further R50 billion ($3.05 Billion USD) secured investment in digital infrastructure.
Reporting from South Africa indicates that the country is an increasingly desirable destination for new data centre builds. Video primer here on data centres from a South African perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDpgwvzHwaQ
For all enquiries, please contact Tom Hegarty at Foxglove: tom.hegarty@foxglove.org.uk/ +44 7821901946.