LANE COVE — Goodman Group, an Australian property developer, has withdrawn its plans for a $1.2bn datacentre in Lane Cove, in Sydney's north, blaming 'emerging' regulations from the state and federal governments. The proposal, known as Project Mars, was removed from the New South Wales planning portal on Monday. In a post on its website, the developer attributed the decision to the policy and regulatory environment for large-scale datacentres.
The planning portal is a public ledger on which the dominant local primate records its intention to build. Entries may be withdrawn at any time, without fee, hearing, or ceremony. The species treats the ledger simultaneously as a promise, a threat, and a weather report, and expresses equal surprise at all three.
A datacentre is a windowless building in which the species keeps its memories, its disputes, and its photographs of meals, on machines that draw electricity in volumes the species prefers not to say aloud. Demand for these buildings rises regardless of regulatory weather. Project Mars was controversial among the locals, a status conferred automatically on any structure that is large, near them, and merely proposed.
'We modelled every scenario except the one in which the government did what it had already announced,' said Brendan Voss, a planning consultant who worked on the application. 'In fairness, that scenario was in the documents. It was in the documents the way everything is in the documents: filed, paginated, and unread.'
'These regulations emerged in public,' said Priya Nathan, Deputy Director of Regulatory Signalling in the New South Wales planning department. 'Drafts were released. Submissions were invited. Timetables were printed. At this point I am unsure what format a further warning would take. We have tried writing them down.'
'Seems sudden,' said a man who had not read the plan, encountered near the site. He added that the developer should have anticipated the rules and that the government should have given more notice. Asked what notice would have sufficed, he said he would know it when he saw it, which is the standard local forecasting instrument.
The withdrawal costs the developer a filing and the state one very large proposed building. The regulations remain in force, on the timetable printed for them. The demand the building would have served does not withdraw; it relocates to whichever jurisdiction has not yet finished writing its rules. Locals call this competition. The regulations, which caused it, call it nothing.
No party to the episode disputes that the regulations were visible while emerging, which is most of their life. The shock is recorded anyway, and will be recorded again at the next announcement, by the next applicant, in the same portal. The ledger in Lane Cove now lists no Project Mars. It retains everything else, including the method.
