Power Guzzlers: Data centre deal — Cape Town forced back to the drawing board

There was, naturally, an appeal against the Municipal Planning Tribunal’s approval of the Equinix data centres – and the City of Cape Town is responding by redrawing the lines of the playing field.

The Municipal Planning Tribunal’s (MPT’s) 14 July approval for the Equinix data centres has been legally suspended and cannot be acted upon after a formal internal appeal was lodged on 6 August by the Housing Assembly social movement and the UK non-profit Foxglove (represented by the Legal Resources Centre).

The City of Cape Town has publicly acknowledged that its data centre approval process requires reform, with Deputy Mayor Eddie Andrews confirming that the City “is in the process of formulating refined development guidelines for large data centre applications”.

Equinix issued a statement that the 327,000m² site it purchased in Cape Town represents a “long-term land bank” and that it “has no immediate plans to develop the site and has not submitted any planning or development applications”. The data centre builder pledged that any future development will be guided by feedback through transparent dialogue with local authorities and communities.

There’s just one issue: while Equinix frames its commitment to consult as forward-looking, the land-use rezoning and bulk reallocation granted by the MPT attach permanently to the land regardless of whether Equinix ever builds.

Asked about its endgame if all the wheeling and dealing turns out to be above board, Foxglove’s communications head Tom Hegarty responded:

“At the moment, we don’t even know if an Environmental Impact Assessment has been done at all, let alone whether it would be above board or not, which rather sums up the case. Our objection, with Housing Assembly, is about the huge gaps in the evidence provided by Equinix to the City of Cape Town, which we argue make it unlawful for the City to make a decision on approving the data centre or not unless and until that evidence is provided. Until it is, it’s impossible for Foxglove to make a judgment on the merits of the application or not.”

He explained that the legal challenge is appealing against the MPT’s decision to approve Equinix’s application to construct the data centre because the MPT lacked “fundamental basic information required for it to do so lawfully”.

He stressed that the “most important thing everyone needs to make an informed decision about this data centre is the critical information that its developers, Equinix, have so far withheld”.

Echoing this concern, dissenting MPT member Wally Johnstone (lead urban planner) explicitly stated during the hearing that the MPT had been asked to grant land-use rights for a 160MVA single-node facility without receiving basic electrical engineering profiling or line-flow assessments.

The MPT relied entirely on a high-level confirmation that Cape Town Electricity had issued a budget quotation and that the developer paid approximately R33-million in shared network charges.