Page 2373 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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In a minute for the LDA on 5 June the project officer in relation to the gas-fired power generation asks for evaluation on the basis that both block 18 section 23 and part block 1630 should provide a data centre and gas-fired power generators. On 6 August 2007 there was a meeting that talks about the site at Hume being one of two stations proposed by ActewAGL and that the site was being developed for a gas-fired power station and data communications centre. You asked rhetorically last night, Mr Deputy Speaker, that if they wanted to build 21 megawatts at Hume and suddenly that was not viable and suddenly they needed at least 210 megawatts and suddenly they needed another 150 megawatts somewhere, where were they going to build it before they decided that they would move the whole lot somewhere else?
I think at some stage they contemplated building the extra lot at Belconnen, and I do not have a problem with this. But I have a problem with the attempts of the ACT government to cover it up. Mr Stanhope was saying: “Nothing to see here, nothing to see here. You don’t have a skerrick of evidence.” There are documents here that tell us over and over again just how important it is to have a data centre powered by a stand-alone facility like a gas-fired power station.
My favourite is the aerial map of the block behind the garden and the vet’s out at Parkwood, on Parkwood Road—quite a long distance from the egg farm, by the way. It is a 16.7-hectare site. Beside that, immediately abutting it, are about two hectares marked “power asset”. We have actually seen officials from ActewAGL saying: “We were going to do it with gas. We are going to run it off the grid and we are going to have a backup diesel generator.” But when I got my briefing on the great virtues of a data centre with gas-fired power station I was told how much better it is to have a freestanding gas-fired power station to supply the thing because you would not have to sit around with millions of litres of diesel, in tanks, subliming away there, polluting the area, escaping into the soil—all of these sorts of things.
But suddenly, when the pressure was put on, they said: “No, no, no, we never planned to build a gas-fired power station in Belconnen. We were going to run it off the mains and if we needed backup power we were going to run it with diesel”—extraordinarily inefficient and, as Dr Foskey said the other day, that would have undermined all of the brownie points for environmental friendliness and a smaller carbon footprint at the other place, simply by burning diesel when you needed to burn diesel.
I do not necessarily have a problem with the idea, and I do not think that the people of Belconnen would necessarily have a problem with the idea, of a data centre appropriately placed. But the fact is that when people started asking questions about this, the things about the Belconnen plant started to disappear off the CTC website, so we started to get the impression that they wanted to hide something.
The other question I ask is about site selection or site identification. Why would the Chief Minister’s Department come up with a site which is 250 metres from the boundary of a current residential development and slap-bang in the middle of an area which the new territory plan identifies as a future urban area? If they were going to have whatever facility it was, powered whichever way it was, why would they want to build it there and then build houses around it? Is this the Chief Minister’s idea of
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