CDC Data Centres emissions data released after claim rejected by watchdog

According to a report by Innovation Aus, CDC Data Centres request to have its greenhouse gas emissions data withheld from public release has been rejected by Clean Energy Regulator, Australia's clean energy watchdog.

The data center company was seeking to have its indirect emissions and energy consumption data for the 2020-21 financial year kept secret, citing that disclosure could reveal trade secrets due to its work with national security and other critical federal government departments that store sensitive and classified information. This reason is one of three arguments that can be made under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) scheme.

Under NGER, subsection 25(3), the regulator is required to be satisfied that disclosure would "reveal, or would be capable of revealing" trade secrets or "any other matter having a commercial value that would be, or could reasonably be expected to be, destroyed or diminished if the information were disclosed."

NGER ruled it was not satisfied that CDC met the criteria, and so the dataset was published. It revealed that CDC Data Centres (CDC) produced emissions of 150,299 tonnes in the 2020-21 financial year; this included 150,136 tonnes of indirect Scope 2 emissions. It also consumed 669,621 Gigajoules of energy during this period.

The data also reveals that emissions were lower than the company's competitors Equinix, NEXTDC and Amazon.