Back in July, when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese waxed wistfully about Australia having another Medicare moment when it came to harnessing artificial intelligence and the data centre boom, he stoked expectations renewable energy would get a rails-run when it came to supplying the many gigawatts of the required extra power supply.
Albanese told us we would accommodate new data centres in an “Australian way, true to our values and our standards”.
His government would “create a legal obligation for the next generation of large-scale data centres to underwrite new power supply” so these electron-gorging giants would “put at least as much energy into our grid as they take out of it”.
Most watchers assumed the new capacity would be clean energy since the obligation, Albanese said, extended to building “new renewable generation – and firming – to strengthen our national energy resilience”.
Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, with Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, in May. (Source: AAP)
