Make Your Voice Heard

How to lodge a submission

• Online, via Council's DA Tracker
• By email to mail@wsc.nsw.gov.au
• By post to PO Box 141, Moss Vale NSW 2577

Making your submission count

The applicant has revised their plans after Council's assessment report recommended refusal. Because the changes are substantial, every submission lodged during this re-exhibition period becomes part of the evidence before the Land and Environment Court.

To make your submission count:

1. Tell us who you are. A sentence or two on how this affects you, your family, your business or your health. Personal accounts carry real weight in these proceedings.
2. Pick 2–4 topics from the list below that matter most to you.
3. Use our full guide for the detail behind each one — reword it in your own words, or paste it in directly.
4. Lodge before 5pm, Monday 31 August 2026, using the options above.

Grounds you can raise

1. Battery size and safety checks — The 30 MW battery is described as a minor building extension rather than a standalone facility, which may avoid the independent safety and fire checks a battery this size would otherwise require.
2. State pollution limits — The physical generating capacity on site appears to exceed the threshold that triggers a mandatory EPA pollution licence.
3. Splitting the project into smaller DAs — This application is being assessed separately from a much larger 673 MW proposal on the same site, which may prevent decision-makers from seeing the full combined impact.
4. Moving the creek & flood risk — The plans involve realigning a natural watercourse for the battery platform, without the flood modelling Council's engineers say is required.
5. Bushfire risk — Council and the NSW Rural Fire Service have identified the site as bushfire-prone land, contrary to the applicant's own assessment.
6. Water use & Sydney's drinking water — Water use figures appear to cover only staff amenities, not the cooling and operational needs of the wider data campus, on a site within Sydney's drinking water catchment.
7. Exhaust stack heights — At 23.5 metres, the proposed stacks exceed both the local Development Control Plan height limit and the Innovation Park masterplan limit.
8. Train line safety — The site is located near an active rail corridor, and the required rail safety assessment doesn't appear to have been submitted.
9. 24/7 noise & low-frequency hum — Continuous engine operation may carry noise toward homes in Burradoo and Moss Vale, and toward the Garvan Institute's nearby medical research facility.
10. Night security lighting — Round-the-clock lighting is planned, but no lighting or light-spill assessment appears to have been submitted, despite Council raising it.

Download the full guide

Why we're talking about gas plants in a data centre inquiry

This inquiry covers AI and data centres broadly. Our focus is the gas-fired power station built specifically to run this data centre — its power source drives most of the project's environmental and community impact, and no part of the data campus could operate without it.

Making your federal submission count

1. Tell them who you are. A sentence or two on your connection to the Southern Highlands and why this matters to you.
2. Pick 2–3 points from the list below — submissions don't need to cover everything.
3. Reference the Southern Highlands Data Campus at 30 Douglas Road, Moss Vale as a case study, not just as a local objection — the committee is looking for evidence the current framework doesn't work, and this project shows exactly that.
4. Lodge before 1 September 2026 via the committee's online submission form (linked above).

Points you can raise

The inquiry's terms of reference (the topics it has been asked to examine) ask about (a) the effectiveness of existing regulatory frameworks — including deals between the Australian Government and global AI companies — and (b) the impacts of AI and data centres on communities, industry, environment, water and energy. Points that speak to those terms:

1. Federal expectations carry no legal force. The Australian Government's March 2026 Expectations of Data Centres and AI Infrastructure Developers are voluntary. Nothing in Commonwealth or NSW law requires a proponent to show alignment with them before approval — and the Moss Vale proposal appears to fall short of each one.
2. The project has been assessed in pieces. The Moss Vale precinct has proceeded as three separate gas-plant applications (14MW approved, 16.5MW before the Land and Environment Court, and a 673MW State Significant Development) alongside a growing number of data centre buildings — Data Building 1 (built), Data Building 2 (approved but not yet built), and further buildings alluded to on the proponent's own website — rather than as one combined project. This may mean cumulative impacts are never assessed together.
3. Agency consultation was bypassed. The NSW Planning Portal's project page for the largest stage does not list the EPA, NSW Health, Endeavour Energy or Wingecarribee Council as having been consulted before the Secretary's Environmental Assessment Requirements were issued — confirmed directly with the Department by email.
4. Public health in an inversion-prone valley. Continuous emissions from a 24/7 gas plant, roughly 500 metres from homes, in a valley known for temperature inversions, don't appear to have been assessed cumulatively with existing industrial sources nearby.
5. Water security in a protected catchment. The site sits within the Sydney Drinking Water Catchment. The operator's own marketing describes groundwater cooling for "zero utility water" use — the cumulative effect of that extraction on the aquifer and the Wingecarribee River doesn't appear to have been independently modelled.
6. An inconsistency in energy policy. Households face restrictions on new gas connections, while a large-scale gas power station can apparently be approved to run a private data centre — worth asking the committee to reconcile.
7. Government-to-AI-company deals lack enforceable follow-through. Commitments made in deals between government and AI companies don't appear to convert into binding conditions when that company's physical infrastructure is assessed at state level — and the physical location of government data processed by hyperscale platforms isn't always publicly disclosed.
8. Ask the committee to reference the site directly. You can ask that the Southern Highlands Data Campus at 30 Douglas Road, Moss Vale be cited in the committee's final report as a working case study of these regulatory gaps.

How to lodge

• Submissions close 1 September 2026.
• Lodge via the online form on the inquiry's Parliament of Australia page (linked above).
• Submissions can be a short letter or a few paragraphs — a formal document isn't required.
• Submissions are generally published on the committee's website unless you request confidentiality.

Download the full guide