Review of datacentre water permit unable to proceed

Environment Southland is unable to proceed with a request by Southland Sustainable Resource Coalition to review Datagrid NZ Partnership Limited’s consent for water take and use because it does not meet the required circumstances in the Resource Management Act 1991.

General Manager Strategy & Regulation Hayley Fitchett said a consent may be reviewed in certain circumstances, including where it is necessary to ensure limits set in a regional plan can be met.

“In this case, the company’s consented operational water take is less than 10% of the limit set in the Proposed Southland Water and Land Plan.

“The consent is yet to be exercised and so there’s no monitoring data to demonstrate the consented rate or volume cannot be fully utilised, either.”

The resource consents Environment Southland has responsibility for relate to discharges to air and land, taking water, and a small wetland.

Please see Environment Southland’s website www.es.govt.nz/datagrid for further information relating to the Datagrid resource consents, including the consents, application documents, technical reports, request and response information and the consent notification report.

The consent notification report sets out why the application by Datagrid was not publicly notified. A key reason is that it was assessed as having only minor environmental effects, as defined in the Resource Management Act. Parties identified as potentially affected provided written approvals and the ecology report noted that the affected wetland is small, dominated by exotic pasture species and has no indigenous species. No modifications or drainage were authorised to the separate regionally significant wetland at the south end of the site.

Southland District Council issued the land use consent to establish the datacentre and enquiries about that consent should be directed to that council.