Dr Bronwyn Cumbo

So they're investing in renewable energy resources and then the challenge of building that renewable infrastructure becomes somebody else's problem.

This is an issue that's coming out at the moment in the parliamentary inquiry that's being run by the New South Wales government.

So data centres are zoned industrial.

So when you have industrial zones, things like light industrial or business enterprises, a bunch of different types of works that you can build in an industrial zone and data centres fall across a number of them.

So that zoning has been set up by local council intentionally to keep it away from residential areas.

But some of the zoning also wasn't expecting to have a type of infrastructure, an infrastructure that's like data centres right up against residential areas.

So every zone's going to hit butt up against another zone somewhere.

And often, particularly in the inner city, it's hitting residential areas.

So when you think about...

Macquarie Park Innovation District in Ryde that was imagined by local council to be an innovation hub.

And what's happened is they're getting a lot of data centres going in there.

It's much more efficient for data centre developers to have multiple data centres in a particular cluster.

just for their own efficiencies and to reduce redundancies for their own designs.

But what's happening is these employment lands that were set up for diversity are now kind of being monopolized by data centers, which is having an impact, not just in terms of the energy and water use on that local grid, but also community impacts.

So these things produce quite a bit of noise because of the air conditions.

They're running 24-7.

You can't turn a data center off.

They also have light.

as part of their security.

In terms of health impacts, there is research coming out around the health impacts of that constant noise, but it's very under-researched at the moment, and it's something that is a concern for a lot of the communities.