Data centres are not the silver bullet for renewable energy project financing, but they are more effective than relying only on federal government’s flagship underwriting scheme, one renewable energy developer says.
European Energy Australia managing director Catriona McLeod says even though data centre customers are demanding, she’d take them over the federal Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) “every day”.
“We have, in the last two to three years, brought six projects to financial close that were all supported by uptake with tech companies,” she said at an energy summit last week.
“There are some really tough negotiators in the data centre offtake space. So I wouldn’t say it’s an easy process, but if I was choosing between offtake with data centre load or the Capacity Investment Scheme, for example, I would choose the data centre offtaker every day.”
McLeod believes the CIS is well run and managed, but as a government scheme it also contains some “intrinsic” difficulties, in that the bidding process is opaque and it takes a long time between bid and finding out a result.
