Essay by Eric Worrall
What could possibly go wrong with this plan?
AI in Australia’s interests
Speech
Wednesday 15 July 2026
The University of Sydney, SydneyThe Hon Anthony Albanese MP
Prime Minister of Australia…
Consider what international investors look for – and then think about what we have:
World class universities, producing skilled graduates and high-quality research.
The traditional resources, critical minerals and rare earths that are essential.
The space to build.
The sunlight to power affordable, renewable, reliable energy.
…
We know that companies will need to invest in skills and training to be successful.
And we know they will need energy too.
We will create a legal obligation for the next generation of large-scale data centres to underwrite new power supply.
To pay their full share of grid connection, so no costs are passed on to homes or businesses.
And to put at least as much energy into our grid as they take out of it.
To be net-generators, not net-users.
To build new renewable generation – and firming – to strengthen our national energy resilience.
And ensure data centres do not increase power prices for Australians.
Australia is the sunniest continent on earth but we’re also the driest.
Which is why our rules will require data centres to minimise their water use, maximise their energy efficiency, and pay for any additional water infrastructure required.
These location, energy and water obligations take in every level of government and their overlapping powers.
…
Read more: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/ai-australias-interests-0
It’s difficult to describe to people outside of Australia just how unfathomably incompetent Australia’s current federal administration is.
This latest brainstorm, to force US AI companies to pay for Australia’s renewable transition, is hot off the back of their other big idea, cancelling tax write-offs on most forms of private real estate and business investment to encourage the construction of new houses.
There’s also a bunch of stuff in the Prime Minister’s speech about trying to make US AI companies pay a fat fee to Aussie copyright owners.
What the Albanese government fails to grasp is AI companies don’t have to be located in Australia to provide services to and make money from Australians. I mean there are significant advantages for Australia if the data centers Aussies use are located in Australia, and fewer issues with Australia’s increasingly strict data privacy laws, but data center operators can make plenty of money from Australia without locating their infrastructure in Australia.
I have no problem with forcing data centers to provide their own power needs. But you have to be reasonable about it, like provide a fast track approval process for installing co-located modular nuclear reactors, or facilitate them building new coal or gas plants.
If powering AI data centers with renewables made economic sense, renewables would already be the preferred means of powering AI data centers. But given all the nuclear reactors, gas plants and other conventional energy facilities AI companies have been purchasing recently, or how the wait time for new high efficiency gas turbines has blown out to 5-7 years thanks to demand from AI companies, renewables are clearly not the preferred option.
Net Zero is a total con trick that achieves NOTHING but poverty.
Ironically, Australia is likely to see the con boomerang.
Nice
I thought that the US and Australia were friendly nations. Why would one friendly nation allow another to traverse the Net Zero path to ruin when we should be advising them otherwise?
Australia is wedded to the United Nations neo-communist agenda. The current PM is a strong supporter of neo-communism.
Labor’s slide into neo-communism is becoming increasingly noticeable as it marches Australia towards an unenterprising future | Sky News Australia
He nor any of his ministers have ever had a real job. All part of the Labor machinery fir their entire lives.
Australia is a fully blown kleptocracy where those in government take what they want and voters from rapidly diminishing private sector get screwed. Australia’s productivity is actually declining. The government supports big bureaucracy and big government so that is the only sector growing. And the salaries they vote for.
One single minister was gifted $155M just for this year of taxpayer funds to run his private crusade for the upcoming COP. Australia is the only serious contender to achieve a NetZero electricity grid. That will involve completely impoverishing the working population.
Australia is taxing US companies to pay for its Net-Zero by 2050, to reduce CO2, an unaffordable suicide pact.
CO2 from the air, and water and nutrients from the soil, and sunshine are essential ingredients for photosynthesis which creates green leaves on plants.
ah, ha- I see what you did there 🙂
Poverty was the goal all along.
theyre well on the way to success
For everyone except the the politicians receiving brown envelopes
” …. the sunlight to power affordable i.e costing a bomb; renewable i.e you have to renew them quite frequently; reliable, i.e. when it is daylight.
I don’t see anything about what happens at night, though.
“What could possibly go wrong?”
What could go right would take up a lot less space.
If renewables are so cheap etc. etc. – why do they always need assistance, subsidies, protection and propaganda?
And why is the inevitable impact HIGHER electricity costs?!
“This latest brainstorm” for brainstorm read brain fart.
Albanese has just formally outlined all the reasons AI companies won’t ever put big data centers in Australia. ‘Unfathomably incompetent’ still does not fully describe him. Delusional.
If Albanese wants new businesses in Australia to produce as much electricity as they consume, that pretty much puts the kibosh on everything including auto dealers, new sewage plants, new roads, new homes…. absolutely everything. Does this man have a brain?
Albanese is so fabulously stupid that he makes Justin Trudeau look like a genius.
That is hard to believe!
I know, but it’s true.
You have not looked at what Albanese has achieved. Take a close look at Snowy Hydro 2. It has gone from a $2bn project to currently $42bn where unions are running rampant. Operators were awarded a pay INCREASE of $50k this year. Around a 10% increase.
It is now a highly unionised site with union dues flooding into Labor coffers to oil their machine.
Victoria has gifted billions to unions over the last decade to oil their State machine.
Blackout was gifted $155M of taxpay funds to take the neo-communist message to COP31.
The Capacity Investment Scheme that Blackout administers is nothing more than theft dressed up under the “renewables” banner.
Unless Trump skewers the neo-communist movement in the USA it will rise through the Democrat machine that is still thriving in California and New York.
Only someone who does not understand neo-communism sees Albanese as fabulously stupid.
Labor have enshrined theft at all levels and throughout the population. Albanese sits at the head of a kleptocracy where taking from makers is the prime objective. Not one single Minister in Albanese’s Government has worked in the private sector beyond being a union organiser. They are ALL part of the Labor machine.
The government has become an organised crime syndicate. Establishing taxpayer funded projects; enforcing union staffing and then extorting union membership fees back to Labor. Victoria has done it best but Albanese has refined at it Federal level. The growing number of voters employed directly by government or on government funded contracts ensures their voting numbers grow.
Do not underestimate this narcistic kleptomaniac. Worse than Putin because he is not exposed to the same scrutiny.
Rhetorical?
You are looking at a neo-communist.
Australia is now a kleptocracy. There is not one current Federal Minister in Australia who has had a real job. They are all part of the Labor machine rising through the union ranks or union/Labor secretariat.
You need to look closely at Victoria to realise how bad it is. The State Government has overspent billions on large projects. Most of excess all goes into union coffers and their enforcers and some comes back to Labor to fund their campaigns.
Now the Federal government is using Snowy Hydro 2 project for the same game. It started as a $2bn project in 2018 to be completed by 2022. It is now a $42bn project and will be completed maybe in the next decade. The unions are running rampant on the site and the government pay them whatever they can get away with. Machine operators were awarded a $50,000 pay RISE this year. About 10% increase on what is already a specialist surgeon’s salary in Australia.
The only reason all this waste can be afforded are exports of mineral wealth from a handful of productive workers.
The neo-communism playbook is being written in Australia.
I’ll see your Albanese and raise you a UK Labour Party
Just another money grab by a government that ran out of tax revenue after their industrial suicide to NetZ. So why would anyone pay to build a data center in Australia when the end result can be realized anywhere in the world?
Exactly!
So, do those Aussie AI/Data Centers power down at night?
Seems rather inconvenient for something that has the requirement of 24 hours a day, 365 days a year operations.
And on cloudy days.
Roger that.
I hope you Aussies like buying your AI services from foreign providers.
The new longer hours have just been posted at the Chinese coal mines, power plants, and slave labor ethnic prisons in western China. Row well and live.
all up it would still be abetter option we do NOT have the water or power gen to support it and builds IN suburbia are insane ideas! see my earlier post where they are forcing them into those areas..however it IS a nice wakeup for city folk who ignored us Rural people when we protest the wind n pv shit on OUR land.
now its planned for their backyards
He’s not called Albosleazy for nothing! Worst prime minister we’ve ever had!
Brilliant. Economic illiterates who think they can merely order economics to do what they want. They’re not insuring citizens don’t pay more, they’re insuring they will.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. ”
Hayek
Fastest way to kill something: tax it to death
In this case, it’s abortion by threat.
well…they taxed tobacco and spirits to ludicrous heights .. and it didnt die it grew a billions$ black market and lost them billions in revenue
ai shite cant do blackmarket
The head line and what he said in the article are not in agreement. What he said per the article is the data centers are to pay for their own energy needs and if possible generate more than they use. Solar power would work with battery storage. Nothing in the article tells one how they can do that at a reasonable cost. If the cost is to high the data center will not be in Australia and connections will have a lag time.
I still wonder why a consumer must provide continuous power, eg all night, when the solar factories, which are all granted immediate approval, don’t have to.
It seems that the problems with solar power must be handled by others, the consumer being number one and the taxpayer number two.
Solar with battery could work, if only someone who invent a battery capable of doing it.
Until such time, solar doesn’t work.
Maybe a STORY TIP in this Anthony?
on the FARCE page
..some dimwit wants to run compressed co2 as a battery in Vic uses ONE load of the co2 and gets used then returned to store I know its utterly warped BUT our govts investing n promoting it
here it is
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2026/07/13/sec-plans-australian-first-compressed-co2-battery-in-victorian-coal-country/
You not only have to store the pressure till it’s required, you would also have to store the heat for that same period, else you’ll be making dry ice when the power is required.
If you thought batteries had problems storing energy for a month, try storing the heat for the same period.
Capable of doing it AND affordable. Not to mention safe. Battery storage is NONE of these things.
yeah so where do they think they can run even MORE wind or PV? and the lines cos we do have to eat and farm ..
No intelligent data center will want a “battery storage facility” anywhere near their precious data equipment.
And as long as we’re on the topic, THAT is a facility that should “provide for its own needs” as opposed to soaking up public resources.
Every “battery storage facility” should have to pay for its own dedicated fire department.
Nuclear energy is illegal in Australia and a recent bill to change that was defeated.
We agree, their government is stupid.
In 2010, Google determined that so called renewables could not power their data centers. Nothing has changed since then
Except the power needs of their data centers is growing. Making it even more impossible.
An interesting aspect of data centre development in Australia is a Singapore based company securing 123Ha of land in the Latrobe Valley. The purchase was on the pretext that it will be a “renewable” energy hub. But Latrobe Valley sits on the lowest cost fuel source in the world. Enough to supply all of Australia’s current electricity needs for millennia.
A change of government to One Nation would make this the most valuable location in the world for an intensive AI data centre.
We published an article a few years ago, a bunch of bitcoin miners wanted to restart a decommissioned Aussie coal plant. They thought they could produce coal power for AU $0.04 / kWh. I’m sure the same economics would work for AI, once the current bunch of incompetents is kicked out of office.
I can’t find the Aussie article, but here’s an article about New York State cracking down on bit coiners trying to restart old coal plants. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/23/new-york-state-cracks-down-on-bitcoin-miners-buying-old-coal-plants/
From JoNova today:
Consumers there pay, on average, $A0.28 ($0.22) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity. But Hunter Energy, which owns Redbank, are offering the crypto miners electricity at a fraction of the cost. The “first-of-its-kind” deal, as the Age puts it, will see the crypto miners pay only A$0.08 per kWh in the day and A$0.05 per kWh at night. Hunter Energy told the Age that the price is feasible because the electricity produced at the coal power plant would go straight to the crypto miners, bypassing—and thus, presumably, avoiding the costs of using—the grid. (Quartz has reached out to Hunter Energy for a comment.)
Latrobe Valley generators sold electricity for 2.3c/kWh as recently as 2003. It would be lower cost now without carbon penalties because there has been next to no capital spent to keep the generators going.
Very interesting, thanks Rick
yeah NAH more power etc for useless shit zero actual worth except to magicmoney spinners and the gullible
nope Pauline would get the coal back id reckon
“World class universities, producing skilled graduates and high-quality research.”
If the Honorable Anthony Albanese is any indication of their world class universities I’m afraid they have a ways to go. Sorry Australia but this guy isn’t helping you.
Australia has a long track record of doing world class research which sometimes has a global impact, for example Australia invented the black box flight recorder for aircraft.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/black-box-invented
But the article above also discusses how the inventor had to go overseas to commercialise his invention because nobody in Australia was interested, which is also a common Aussie theme.
It is a common theme all over. Elon Musk is a prime example.
yes Blushwood for cancer treatment thats gone OS
yeah and most are OS who either then use the ed system to get citizenship or they f off back home
That’s right, force the taxpayer to pay for something that’s unattainable in the first place. While it’s at it, why doesn’t the government take up a collection to fund a voyage to Jupiter into the bargain?
Clearly the Albanese government has not had the idea to ask an AI based evaluation of these ideas. I’m pretty sure Grok would come back with a single line: Pie in the Sky.
If Albanese can read he should take a look at the latest ‘World Energy Investment 2026’ (May 2026) from the IEA
“Orders for new natural gas fired power plants surged to 130GW in 2025, a 25 year high, with US data centre demand a major factor”
my post on X earlier
under the same SHITTY laws they enacted to FORCE PV n wind into rural areas ..well how now brown cow 😉 the City folks are getting a taste of the same enforcement no “community objection allowed” VOTE LABOR OUT!
Fury grows as Allan govt pushed to fast-track monster data centres in your backyard Local councils say they are powerless to stop multibillion-dollar data centres from being fast-tracked into their suburbs under the Allan government’s controversial planning scheme (paywalled Tiser)
Is there actually any requirement for those AI datacentres to put as much power into the grid as they take out at the time they do so? Couldn’t AI datacentres simply build massive solar farms to dump noontime power into the grid at whatever location averages the most sunshine, whether they make a profit or absolutely crash the cost of power, then argue their 24/7 power demands have been equalled per the PM’s requirements even as they co-locate near a reliable stable electricity producing coal plant? Of course it may be easier and cheaper to rely on CCP or US AI, but I’m wondering if the Albo & Bowen Circus have left a third way to shoot Australia in the foot?