Essay by Eric Worrall
Its a tough call – supporting the Federal Government’s renewable energy programme vs having an economic future.
Data centres are incompatible with renewable energy targets
Monday 27 July 2026
The Northern Territory government is backing plans for a $40 billion data centre industry, with several ‘hyper-scale’ AI data centre campuses to be built on land around 30 kilometres from Darwin.
These data centres would be powered by 3 GW of electricity generation, which in turn would be powered by gas from the NT’s Betaloo Basin.
The plan puts the NT government at odds with the federal government, which has drafted rules that would force data centres to power their operations with new renewable energy sources.
The issue is expected to come to a head at a meeting of energy ministers this week, with the Queensland government publicly opposed to the renewable-only proposal, given a lack of modelling and clarity over how the plan would work.
Data centres are incompatible with renewable energy targets:
The debate comes as Australia is on the verge of a major boom in data centre investment.
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Read more: https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/07/data-centres-are-incompatible-with-renewable-energy-targets/
The rebellion has spread from Queensland to the Northern Territory.
The economics driving this rebellion are simple – whoever breaks ranks with the federal green mandate gets to pull hundreds of billions of dollars of dollars of high tech investment, secure well paid jobs for university graduates, a construction industry boom, and a deluge of state tax revenue.
Whoever sticks with the Aussie federal government’s plan to try to force data centers to build renewables gets left in the dust.
It will be fascinating to watch as this evolves.
Beer and popcorn at ready as the curtain is raised on the spectacle.
Perhaps they should ask A.I. Chatbots how 100% Renewable Generation could power A.I. Data Centers with guaranteed power 24/7/365.
Here’s what Google A.I. has to say on the subject…
The only way renewables work IS with “Drastic Overbuild” of capacity and “Massive Battery” storage plus Dedicated Capacity to recharge those Batteries daily.
The world currently uses 87 Terawatt hours of energy daily. To electrify everything would require doubling that to 175TWh daily. Then to electrify the energy impoverished and allow them to enjoy everything we do would require a minimum 45TWh additional capacity so between 220-250TWh of Capacity plus storage plus dedicated capacity for storage recharge
You are looking at this the wrong way. The Oz government don’t care for 24/7 energy. They want you to be begging for their help, in return you keep voting for them and they keep borrowing/printing money.
For the government, it only becomes a problem when the food and water runs out. Or maybe it’ll be when the food is still several hundred kilometres away from the consumer and there is no transport fuel. If the government is lucky, they’ll be able to escape the masses and their pitchforks by using the last of the liquid fuels to drive off into the sunset.
Sadly, this isn’t /s.
I want to see them build pumped hydro with just sunshine and breezes. It takes FF to make anything useful, and anything useless.
I don’t think the unions would allow that. If it doesn’t make every tradie a millionaire, then the project is not going ahead.
Besides, it’s not like the government can’t just print more money.
See if you can work out which of the above should have the /s tag. Hint, the left don’t think that either need the /s tag.
And don’t forget rain…..
“green hydrogen”
It exists only in dreams.
Green ANYTHING exists only in dreams. Unless you embrace back breaking labor digging and hunting with sticks.
Better hurry up with the rational economic development before dear leaders override such thinking.
AI data centers expose the real program. They run contrary to Net Zero. They must have continuous high density power; not renewables. Ever kilowatt is converted to heat. They are essentially gigantic electric heaters. How are they allowed to exist, actually encouraged? Could it be it was never about emissions and climate? Could it all be about tracking and control? Just asking.
Don’t forget politicians are mostly complete technophobes. Once they realise how useful AI is for monitoring citizens all barriers will disappear. But in the meantime, their focus is the looming serious political embarrassment. If renewables cannot power data centers, they can’t power the economy – which exposes renewables proponents as the idiots they are.
I think that the government are just starting to accept that the W&S powered grid is no good. They will soon be asking ALL consumers to provide their own power.
Remember when batteries were offered, via rebates, to all households and small business. This is just step two on the plan that leads to long term blackouts.
Eric, if you think they don’t already know that, you’re being naive. They also know that AI can expose them for what they are.
Efficient labor use is the enemy of full employment.
AI may be useful or even necessary but every new technology, if you can call it that, comes with baggage. We already have given up some rights to privacy, lack of noise, and others similar like unwanted interruptions, sometimes from unavoidable advertisements. TV shows come with unnecessary noise, rapid screen shifts measured in seconds which may already have negative effects along with all the horror shows. We recently lost over a four decade phone number from about the time of laptops when a computer expert cautioned me that their effects might not be all positive. All the negativity is not from computers but it may be worth segmenting along with what they allowed.
The computer expert obviously missed one important step…. Did they INSIST on you doing a back-up, regularly?
If not…… Well who’s to blame?
what strange country has phone numbers which are 40 digits long?
Maybe those stuck on renewables could use the steam from Guterres (UN chief) boiling oceans to run giant turbines to power AI centers::)).
The problem with that approach is that a heat engine needs two things, one is heat, the other is cooling. If the oceans were truly to boil, there would be no where to dump the heat from the system.
Of course you knew that, I was just being ‘techie’ for the other readers.
Boiling involves a great deal of energy transforming the liquid to the gaseous state. What fails to happen is a reduction of temperature as ALL the water stays at the same temperature until all of it has become vapour.
School level Introductory science.
Here’s another one for you, the steam is also at 100C. It only gains temperature if there is the addition of further energy.
The boiling oceans, (at 100C), clearly can’t add any more. There are laws covering that.
I’m not sure that’s true. While living in Los Angeles, I would cook some meat cuts until the internal temp was 210 degrees F. When I moved to the mountains near Reno I learned that the temperature stopped at 203 degrees F for quite a while before continuing to climb. At 210 degrees it was dry and leathery – basically inedible. 212 in LA is about 198 at 5700 ft higher than LA.
Conversely, as you go below sea level, especially at ocean pressures, the boiling point probably rises, although I haven’t tested that.
Speculation is beginning to emerge in the financial blogosphere that the AI tech bubble is about to burst because return on investment in AI technology and for large AI data centers simply isn’t there.
News at 11 …. Or whenever ……
The ROI seems to be getting farther away.
Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI (paywalled)
What a lot of corps are doing is not abandoning AI. They’re going for cheaper AI options, like Chinese models, for less serious stuff. And in the end they’ll probably end up paying more when their data ends up in the hands of the Chinese government.
There will always be that low-level IT guy who wants to cut corners and lets Deepseek have access to the company DB so it can “optimize”.
We didn’t stop using websites because the .COM bubble burst. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft will survive the coming AI crash.
Can we maybe pick two out of the three to survive? I think we should have that choice.
Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Jeep?
Will Amazon, Google and Microsoft become Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Plymouth?
No – as AI ain’t the ICE – vehicle of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
AI is a side show – not their main business.
+ FASAB 56 enables them to lie about losses if they pretend national security/interest
and get hidden QE from the government(but it’ll take a few year before this merger between state and corporations becomes common knowledge )
I see a major shakeout coming in the AI landscape. I think ChatGPT (OpenAI) will be one of the casualties. There will certainly be others. In the end, we’ll have a small handful that survive. IMO one of the likely survivors will be Claude (Anthropic).
Not so sure about Copilot – in my experience it’s proven unreliable. But it DOES have MS clout behind it.
It is clear the Aussie leadership is worthless, Aussies should pay no attention to them.
Unstated background. The NT is being absorbed into the dominance and control of the Aboriginals who are working the Original Owners scam as Original Owners of the Land and their sacred Kulcher which they are inventing as they go along.
A great deal of attention need to be taken of this absurd nonsense.
A bunch of people who claim to have had custody and control and “care” of the entire continent while failing to develop clothes or shoes, housing, agriculture, writing while “caring” for the land by using the firestick now want to take over 21st century First World Australia and milk all the “cargo” they can get.
Australians should never have an Albanese as Prime Minister for the same reasons
Albanians should never have an Australese as president.
It always ends up with treason.
Queensland and Northern Territory are no strangers to use of wind & solar generated power sources.
Remote cattle stations & mining operations have been using these as conditions allow to supplement their main power source – diesel generators to keep arrays of battery banks charged up.
So the denizens of Qld & NT are well versed in the capabilities & limitations of wind & solar.
They’re taking a rational approach to powering AI data centres based on lived experience.
And voting with their wallets.
Renewables in the far north are a non starter, in winter you get good sunshine, but in wet season you get weeks or months of cloudy skies, heavy rainfall and, at times, hurricane strength winds. Only an ignorant Canberra politician could believe renewables are a viable solution.
I tend to think that W&S do have a place on remote properties.
Remember the old water pump windmills, they still work and have been in operation for generations. Also, anyone using diesel for the generator fuel would appreciate anything that the solar panels can offer, even if they only allow the generator to switch back to a gentle idle for a few hours a day, (excluding engine pots glazing over, etc). With a little extra, they could install a small battery to offer supplemental supplies for the 4 hours around midday and turn off the generator completely.
Bulk W&S have there uses but sadly NOT when you have a reliable grid connection at your finger tips. I give ‘Blackouts’ and his PM a few more years before that word, ‘reliable’, is redefined to mean something completely different. And I don’t think it will be just Oz that will feel the pain.
Oh I agree, I’ve used solar before when it was inconvenient to run an electric wire to some device which needed a bit of power. But you need that fossil fuel backup generator, and it’s really expensive compared to grid power.
Ruinables just don’t get no respect. No respect at all, I tell ya.
Nor do they deserve any! (All kidding aside).
Related topic to this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4SOeJCJJWY
The ex civil servant blowing the whistle
Mr Pearl names a few of the perpetrators 5:50 onwards
there is a long version
This might be worth looking at as a News Tip
This is part of a longer interview imho well worth watching the link is in the description
They’re sick of it Albo Bowen and Co-
Karl exposes brutal Australia truth
Even a broken clock gets the time correctly twice a day.
Data centres, get you own power source at no costs drawn from outside the actual business running them.
I have no problem with data centers having to BYO power. But you have to be reasonable about it, like let them build a gas turbine plant or a small nuclear reactor.
Quote: hundreds of billions of dollars of dollars of high tech investment, secure well paid jobs for university graduates, a construction industry boom, and a deluge of state tax revenue
What high tech investment? What secure well paid jobs? What construction industry boom? What deluge of state tax revenue.
My crystal ball says that there is no more high tech investment in a data centre than in any other large warehouse. The chips and computers are manufactered elsewhere, shipped to the site and installed by a fly in fly out workforce.
Secure well paid jobs? What, for air conditioning mechanics?
Construction industry boom? What, for a few dozen warehouses?
Deluge of state revenue? What state tax? On workers located on the other side of the planet? On results computed and delivered off site to users and charged in another jurisdiction.
Goodness me. Talk about pie in the sky.
Just a quick thought about time zones and engineering.
I would have thought that some clever people would realize that apart from providing power it really doesn’t matter where a computer is located. The whole cloud concept is based on redundancy and geographically spread data.
So these computers CAN run on solar providing you have enough of them spread around the world and overbuilt in every time zone to the extent that there is always one or more computers with power to keep working. The others can go to sleep until favourable conditions return.
Now whether that is more economically viable than nuclear colocation or sponging off other people’s infrastructure is an open question but …
Not every data centre needs to operate 24/7.
Space based Interconnected satellites….?
Yes, or fibre. Satellites have greater latency but there aren’t too many applications for AI which require low latency.
So you have millions of dollars’ worth of data centers sitting idle waiting for the sun to rise or come out from behind clouds? And need I mention winter? Hmmm…
Yep. That’s the only way I can see that data centres could run on intermittent power. Be intermittent in operation.
I wasn’t advocating such a thing by the way. But who knows. No idea is too stupid until the wrong person has it.
It’s all under control folks and there’s nothing like cheaper power to bring out the minstrel-
Half-price power: record renewables push prices down
Just one snag apart from the Treasury red ink subsidising all the fickles and home batteries etc. July 1st saw my retailer knock a couple of cents off the peak power rate (now 41.07c/kWhr) only to raise the daily service charge from 105.6c to 174.65c a day which was typical for NEM grid retailers.
Now even that doesn’t cover the true cost of poles and wires as the commercial generators pay substantially too hidden in their pricing but it’s the beginning of lifting grid pricing to truer cost for consumers as they roll out their fickles spaghetti and meatballs grid. Otherwise all those who can afford to avail themselves of subsidised home solar and batteries will be freeriding on the renters and poor folks like they are now. Notice also with a solar glut midday Minister Bowen demanded 3 hours of free power for all and those with subsidized home solar batteries and concessional novated lease EVs smelled a rat.
Story Tip — Australia — More ‘good’ news for Magoo & climate clown Bowen >>
Renewable energy investment plunges to decade low as major projects stall.. See joannenova.com.au
Lord Nelson is not amused-
Coal and gas exports ‘undoing’ progress on clean energy
If those initiators of AI evolution are right, then the answer to this question how to power AI centres is already to hand.
Simply ask Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT or whoever, what is the least cost method of powering AI centres.
The answer should come back in a nano second if it is allowed to be revealed.
Since the Australia has an abundant supply of nat. gas, electrical power plants using CCGT technology is the best method for producing electricity and have a thermal efficiency of 64%. However, there is currently about a five year backlog for new turbines. Nuclear power plants have a thermal efficiency of about 30%.
We have to convince Premier Anthony A. and the Canberra Climate Cartel that they should abandon their draconian climate agenda and their goal on Net Zero by 2050. We also have to inform them that a cubic meter of air currently contains only mere 0.85 g of CO2. Most the CO2 produced from all sources is readily absorbed by the oceans and fresh water.
Humans in Qz exhale ca. 28 million kgs of CO2 everyday and population of humans is increasing.
To this should be added the CO2 exhaled by 69 million sheep, 30 million cattle, and 1 million camels. Another major sources of CO2 is baking a brewing.
AI images like the one featured here are great but they can distort reality. To show a newly constructed modern, coal power plant spewing black particulate laden flue gas is nonsense. A modern coal pant is likely to be at least super critical technology if not ultra-super critical HELE technology, with advanced particulate control technology.
Also, in the absence of photo shopping tricks, black smoke just doesn’t spew from cooling towers?
Good pick up but artistic license makes the point complete with a likeness of a panic struck politician.
I also noted the smoke pouring from the cooling towers. That is just wrong, because everyone knows cooling towers are where the nuclear reactors are, in post-TMI imagery.
Watching some people throwing the baby out with the bathwater started out amusing but is now getting boring. What technology could reduce their carbon dioxide boogyman the most? AI, of course.
Consider just one AI-initiated advancement:
AI-reformulated concrete uses machine learning to optimize mix designs, cutting carbon emissions by 20% to 40% per batch. Widespread adoption will reduce global CO2 by 500 million tons annually, an offset equivalent to taking roughly 110 million average gas-powered cars off the road.
Machine learning models (such as those by Concrete.ai) analyze local raw materials and performance data to calculate precise, low-cement formulas that maintain or exceed required structural strength. Realize the basic components do not change; costs and product attributes remain the same. Only the proportions in the mix are adjusted.
Early field tests and commercial rollouts have already optimized millions of cubic yards of concrete across the United States and international markets. Full industry adoption targets a reduction of up to 500 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.