Surfing venue with data centre faces new 3.8°C climate warming rule

To some North Shore neighbours, a new sustainable surf park will be “a jewel in the crown for the wider community”. That’s according to Brian Sutton, chair of the Dairy Flat Land Owners Group. It will be a head start for future growth, says another neighbour; it will make the community a better place to live and visit, says a third.

“The creation of 200 jobs, post construction, is a boost for an area where employment opportunities on that scale are rare,” says Employers and Manufacturers Association strategy boss Alan McDonald, in a submission. “The potential to host international and national surfing events … is another upside.”

But the 43 hectare development proposal from international Wavegarden developer Aventuur, powered by a solar farm and warmed by coolant water from a big new Spark data centre, also has its opponents.

The deadline for comments to the fast track consenting panel was last week. Neighbours Angela and Ben Parsonage are nervous about the noise; Lindsay Howitt agrees, and also worries about the light pollution and the added traffic on the country roads. Yong Kwan Lee expresses “deep concern” about the water discharge, with more flooding forecast in coming winters.

And he has heavyweight backing. Auckland Council has also written to the panel, expressing its opposition – on new grounds that will set a high bar for new developments citywide.

The council’s Healthy Waters department, which is responsible for stormwaters, says flooding provides a greater hazard to people, property, infrastructure and the environment than the developers have allowed for.

Aventuur and Spark’s flood assessment factored in the impact of up to 200mm rainfall in floods, caused by a scenario of 2.1 degrees Celsius climate warming.

But it failed to use the new “up-to-date climate change factor” of 3.8°C warming that the council now requires, according to the council’s senior stormwater engineer Lakshmi Nair.

The Spark data centre would obstruct an overland flow path that can run at 1.56 cubic metres a second, Nair adds, and the plans don’t provide for any diversion or protection.

Adrian ‘Ace’ Buchan, the Australian pro surfer who is director of surf and sustainability for Aventuur, says the company is already responding to the council’s feedback and to the consenting panel, as part of the fast-track process.

“The flood modelling assessment is based on the standard set out in the Auckland Council Code of Practice,” Buchan says. “The design of the data centre already incorporates best practice climate change and flood risk assessment, protecting for risk beyond the standard recommendation.”

The requirement to plan for 3.8°C warming could come as a surprise to many Aucklanders, given that New Zealand is working towards an international target of just 1.5°C global warming.

Data centres’ water and power usage efficiency

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change projects 2.1 to 2.3°C of warming if Paris targets are fully implemented, and 2.4 to 2.8°C if only the bare minimum of the targets are achieved.

The United Nations Environment Programme’s emissions gap report warns of 3°C warming by the year 2100, and still rising beyond that, on current policies. It predicts 2.5 to 2.9°C warming if Paris targets are achieved, at least in part.

So where does Auckland Council’s new 3.8°C warming planning requirement come from?

Craig McIlroy, the general manager of Healthy Waters, says it’s the projected air temperature warming for Auckland, specifically, rather than the globe as a whole. It’s based on Niwa’s projected changes in seasonal and annual mean temperature for the Auckland region, through to about 2120.

The figure has been written into the upcoming Stormwater Code of Practice, and is based on Te-Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri: Auckland’s Climate Plan, which says the council will prepare according to the existing emissions pathway – meaning a temperature rise of 3.5°C-plus by the end of the century.

“Niwa’s latest climate change projections for Auckland provide an expected temperature rise of 3.8 degrees in 100 years’ time, which is the timeframe we use for land use planning decisions.” he explains.

“Auckland Council has a rolling programme of updating flood models at a catchment level with the latest available information, including climate change projections.”

The criticism for failing to meet climate standards will be frustrating for the developers of the surf park and associated data centre, who had insisted the project was sustainable.

Sir John Kirwan is a part-owner of the company developing the surf park, and has surfed similar Wavegarden-branded facilities in Melbourne and Switzerland. He believes Auckland will set new benchmarks for surf park design, experiences, and sustainability.

“I’m really excited about our ability to heat the water year-round,” Kirwan says. “It’s a world first relationship between a surf park, data centre, and solar farm which will complete a sustainable virtuous circle.

“Nobody else in the world has done it this way and we’re especially proud to bring this development to Auckland, achieving better sustainability outcomes together with Spark through innovation.”

Michael Stribling, Spark’s general manager of digital infrastructure, sat down for an interview with Newsroom.

He says the design for the proposed data centre ensures the floor level of the data centre exceeds the minimum level required, even in a 3.8°C temperature rise scenario.

The design also considers and manages overland flow across the site to prevent any impact to data centre operations or surrounding property, he says, including via diversion and stormwater catchment areas.

Asked whether he considers 3.8°C warming to be an over-cautious threshold, he declines to comment.

Stribling says data centre design is not just about power, but also about the use of water on the site. That’s why pumping the coolant water from the data centre into the surf lagoon, to heat it in winter, is groundbreaking.

Some of Spark’s 16 data centres use the town water supply, one in Christchurch has its own bore into the aquifer, and the latest data centre pod at Takanini can also use air as a coolant – but wherever water is used, there are questions about where it comes from, and how it’s discharged.

The surf park project was added last year to Schedule 76 of the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Referred Projects Order 2020, by former environment minister David Parker. He said it had the potential to generate about 2,100 full-time equivalent jobs over a four-year design and construction period, and 200 ongoing jobs. It had the potential to have positive effects on social wellbeing by providing opportunities for active recreation; and enhancing the ecological values of streams and wetlands.

Any actual and potential effects on the environment, and mitigation measures, could be appropriately tested by the expert consenting panel, he concluded.

The panel, chaired by resource management lawyer Graeme Mathias, is due to make its decision by April 10.

And already, the new Government has expressed its support in a submission from Arts and Heritage Minister Paul Goldsmith. “I support the intent of the project, to construct and operate a surf park, data centre and solar farm in Silverdale, Auckland,” he writes.

That puts the minister at odds with Auckland Council (concerned about climate readiness) and both Auckland Transport and Waka Kotahi (which question how the data centre plans can be reconciled with an Albany-to-Milldale rapid transit corridor bisecting the development).

Water use, in power generation and as coolant

Spark says it’s designing its new 10MW Dairy Flats data centre campus to a market leading level of sustainability, targeting LEED Gold design certification.

Already anticipating increasing its compute scale to 40MW, it’s aiming for “industry best practice” power, water and carbon usage effectiveness.

In addition to the heat exchange and on-site renewable energy initiatives, the data centre plans to source electricity from new generation renewable energy projects in New Zealand, in line with Spark’s sustainability commitments.

“We are careful about the amount of water that we use, and as with power, we seek to make as efficient use of water as possible, and to think about ways that we can reuse water on the site,” Michael Stribling says.

“There’s a lot of focus that goes on data centres from a sustainability perspective. The work that goes into the design, to make sure they are as efficient and sustainable as possible – there’s actually a lot of pressure on us in our industry to do that. There’s always the opportunity to do better.”

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is the ratio of a facility’s total power usage, usually measure in kilowatt hours, divided by the power usage for its actual compute.

Average PUEs worldwide have fallen from 2.5 in 2007 to 1.55 in 2022. Spark says its new POD2 development at its Takanini data centre campus achieves a PUE of less than 1.2, which it believes to be market leading for a data centre in New Zealand – but hyperscalers Microsoft and Meta are reporting PUEs of around 1.1 at their newest overseas data centres.

Water usage efficiency (WUE) is calculated differently: it measures the litres used per kilowatt-hour. Spark won’t say what WUE it hopes to achieve, but Meta and Amazon claim their newest data centres have WUES of about 0.2, down from an average 1.8 just eight years ago.

There’s no doubt the data centre industry has been under enormous pressure to improve its environmental efficiency, as AI drives up the quantity of computing work at exponential rates.

Google and The Dalles, a city in Oregon, took a lawsuit against the The Oregonian newspaper in a failed bid to prevent it disclosing the water deal that the city council had signed with Google.

Last year, the newspaper was finally able to report that Google’s three data centres in the city consumed 355.1 million gallons (1.3 billion litres) of water – a volume that since 2017 had nearly tripled since to a quarter of the town’s entire supply.

The discharge is equally contentious. Newsroom has revealed that Amazon’s plans to build a hyperscale data centre in west Auckland are stalled by council concerns about its water discharge.

Because the new Dairy Flats surf park and data centre is in a rural area, it won’t be on municipal water supply. According to its consent applications, the development will use 270 cubic metres of water an hour, from a tributary of the Rangitopuni Stream that runs through the property. It will also collect roof water.

AW Surf Park Ltd’s directors are Richard Duff, Nicholas Edelman and Andrew Ross from Aventuur, alongside Auckland property developer Mark Francis. The company is majority-owned by Aventuur, but Francis owns a 25 percent share. John Kirwan jointly owns a 7.5 percent share with former sports media executive and Warriors boss Trevor McKewen.

Kirwan says the masterplanned development has a significant focus on sustainability, with the project targeting a New Zealand Green Buildings Council Green Star certification for best practice sustainable design and build benchmarks.