• Housing Assembly and Foxglove are appealing planning approval for two proposed data centres at King Air Industria near Cape Town airport
  • Equinix owns land at the site, but the proposed facilities' cooling system, water demand and electricity requirements have not been disclosed

The fact

Housing Assembly and Foxglove are appealing planning approval for two proposed data centres at King Air Industria near Cape Town International Airport. The organisations argue that the facilities were approved under planning rules intended for warehouses.

Reuters reported in July that Cape Town's municipal planning tribunal had approved the two facilities despite objections from the groups. Equinix has confirmed that it bought land at King Air Industria, but told the Financial Times that it has no immediate development plans for the site and did not submit the applications. The Financial Times reported that planning documents identify Equinix as the developer.

Foxglove said in April that its objections concerned the information provided on water use, electricity requirements, environmental effects and backup generators. These are arguments made by the campaigners and are not findings that the proposed facilities would cause those effects.

Equinix's general guidance on data-centre cooling describes air-cooled chillers as systems that can reject heat without consuming water, while using more electricity than evaporative cooling. It separately describes liquid cooling around servers as a closed-loop system. The guidance does not identify which cooling design, if any, is proposed for the Cape Town site.

The assessment

Cooling sits at the centre of why the planning dispute matters for a data-centre project. Permission for a building does not by itself establish how much water or electricity a particular facility will need. Those requirements depend partly on the cooling system, and the material available for the Cape Town proposals does not identify the design that would be used.

Equinix's own general guidance illustrates the trade-off. Air-cooled chillers can avoid water consumption at the building-cooling stage, but use more electricity than evaporative systems. If the appeal results in a requirement for more detailed resource information, the developer may have to settle parts of the cooling design earlier and match its electricity and water requirements to that choice. There is no evidence that such a redesign has occurred or that a particular cooling system has been selected for the site.

For BTW readers, the appeal could determine how much operating detail must be established before these data-centre proposals can move forward under the existing approval. If further information is required, cooling, electricity and water requirements may have to be defined more clearly before later project planning can proceed.

What to watch

Watch the appeal decision and whether the existing planning approval is upheld, amended or sent back for further review. Any project-specific filing identifying the cooling system, electricity demand, water requirements or backup generation would clarify the infrastructure the proposed facilities would actually require.