Data centres could unblock renewables bottlenecks – if they don't hit barriers of their own

Data centres could supply the wave of fresh energy demand that renewables need to get built, but they could just as likely be stymied by exactly the same things plaguing wind, solar and storage developers, a report by BNEF says.

Australia has a data centre pipeline of around 20 gigawatts (GW), or about 25 GW of peak grid load were it all to get built, says the report APAC Data Center Market Prospects: Australia, Japan and Korea.

For comparison, BNEF analysts are forecasting Australia will build about 50 GW of solar, storage and wind over the next eight years.

And while there are “genuine bottlenecks” in the Australian grid that are holding up the progress of new energy generation projects, BNEF analysts don’t see these causing data centres a problem – yet.

“The risk of securing renewables becomes more material as data centre campuses scale into the hundreds of megawatts, or as aggregate data centre demand reaches multi-gigawatt scale,” the report says.