Six data centre proponents are seeking water supply from TasWater, a parliamentary inquiry has heard, prompting the Greens to call for developers to consult communities before lodging plans.
The Greens said TasWater told the inquiry into AI data centres today that the proponents were preparing development applications through local government.
Greens MP Tabatha Badger said it was not known who the proponents were or how large their projects would be.
According to the Greens, TasWater said some could be small bitcoin mining operations seeking a standard water connection, but Badger said others could be as large as 300 megawatts.
The Office of the Coordinator-General told the inquiry on Tuesday it did not have water use information for the data centre proposals tabled in parliament and expected most proponents would not have it either.
A government document tabled in September listed 10 data centre proposals that would use up to about 1,150 megawatts of electricity, but the water requirements of six confidential proposals were listed as “not defined”.
That document identified the six confidential proposals only as proponents three to eight and did not say whether they came from one company or several.
Two were listed at 200-300 megawatts each, with the others at 50 megawatts, 50 megawatts, five megawatts and less than one megawatt.
Given limited water allocations and imminent restrictions, Badger said there were “legitimate questions as to just how much water these six data centres plan to use and whether they are a good allocation of the state’s water supply”.
She said restrictions were expected in George Town, near a potential 288-megawatt data centre at Bell Bay and the Greens understood proponents would need to manage their own water over summer.
Badger said the cumulative impact on the state’s water system needed to be examined and the Auditor-General was investigating water management in Tasmania.
“We haven’t got the fundamentals in place to really see what this impact is gonna be on our water system,” she said.
“We are the Wild West and this is our concern,” she said.
“Until we actually have the guardrails in place, it is a free-for-all.”
The Greens want the state government to make early community consultation mandatory before development applications are lodged, saying most inquiry submissions considered that stage too late.
“They don’t have to wait for the outcomes of this inquiry to be doing that and that’s what we’d be calling on them to do,” Badger said.
Government minister Roger Jaensch said “our planning and approval processes always include this sort of information”.
“It’s a public process that we run through, the same for these developments as any others,” he said.
Jaensch said it was appropriate for new developments needing water to talk with the responsible utilities.
