Back in twenty nineteen, a new venture in the Australian Outback looks set to export our solar power to the world, upending our neighbour's reliance on fossil fuels.
Now.
One of the most ambitious projects in Australia right now is sun Cable.
This is Australia's largest ever renewable energy project, a bold plan to turn an old pastoral station in the heart of the Northern Territory into a massive solar farm, transporting electricity first to Darwin via eight hundred kilometers of overhead transmission lines, then on to Singapore through four three hundred kilometers of subsea cables.
Some Cable is a company that was set up initially to export a very large amount of solar energy through the construction of a submarine cable. It was quite a grand vision connecting Northern Australia to Southeast Asia.
Backed by billionaires Michael Cannon Brooks and Andrew Forrest. Some Cable was audacious in a scale and climate. At a Katown Joshi was drawn to it from the start. Back then he interviewed its founder and what he heard Sandlucke science fiction.
And I was a little stunned by his descriptions because they were so sci fi. In fact, he mentions this thing called the Kardashev scale, which is this idea that civilizations progress along their development based on how much energy they consume. And it was a really fascinating and surprising way to talk about something which was a big infrastructure projects for Australia. And I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was very grand and it appealed to the sci fi kid in me.
Some cable was meant to show what a different future could look like, one where Australia could export massive amounts of renewable power. But now that future is being overtaken by something else entirely as big tech converges on Australia to build data centers for AI. There's a fight over how to use our renewable energy, and big tech is winning. I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven Am Today.
Writer and senior Research associated at the Australia Institute, Katan Joshi on how Australia's AI push is colliding with the energy transition and what it means for our missions, our power grid and the dream of becoming a clean energy exporter. It's Tuesday, January twenty seven in the scheme of things. How important was this project in terms of becoming an exporter of renewable energy?
This was one of the biggest in Australia for sure. There's many different ways that Australia can be seen as a clean energy exporter. You can dig up lithium and you can ship it to China to have a process eventually used in electric vehicles or batteries grid scale battery storage. Australia can also export knowledge in the form of people
who work on solar panels. That so happened quite a lot in the past, but this was one of the first big projects that I remember hearing about where it was literally physically exporting clean energy and in the form of a cable that was of a length that was unprecedented. It wasn't really a concept that people were familiar with or that they considered to be particularly likely. There is a lot of skeptics, and I actually think that's quite a healthy thing to be skeptical about these sorts of
megaprojects that have a very different concept to them. But at the same time I think that was a good thing so the vision of Australia being a country that exports energy, but energy that is not produced from fossil fuels. This was one of the biggest.
Tell me about some cables backers and how satifni it was at the time to have two Australia's most powerful billionaires involved.
Yeah, that's Mike cannon Brooks, one of the co founders of Atlasian and heavily involved in the clean energy spased in Australia as a funder an investor. And Andrew Forrest, the mining magnet currently with ford Eskew. And Andrew Forrest has been heavily backing the idea of hydrogen as a clean energy fuel, and ford Eskew has been making a bunch of major investments in that regard. Both of them
have a very different approach. It was reported that Forrest was really much more interested in using the solar power to produce hydrogen and then ship that hydrogen overseas and that's how the export of clean energy happens, whereas canon Brooks really wanted to focus on the original plan to basically build a giant submarine electricity cable connecting northern Australia up to Southeast Asia, and it was this tension that played a role in the eventual falling out of those
two billionaires behind this project, and Canon Brooks eventually won out.
But then towards the end of last year, the company announced that that priority of exporting clean energy had changed that would focus more now on Australia. So why is that that's correct?
Yeah, so this was recently announced that they sort of maintained that their long term focus is on export of clean energy, but in the short term they'll be focusing on providing clean electricity to data center facilities, which is large warehouses full of computers. People mostly know them for doing things like running video calls or storing files, but more recently they've been growing in their applications for artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is the predominant mode of
growth for data centers. So if you're seeing a new one, it's probably something to do with AI, and specifically the type of artificial intelligence that generates information so text, images, and videos. That is something that is quite new in Australia. Australia is actually the second largest jurisdiction in the world for planned data centers. I think people don't quite nervous, not just in terms of the amount of dollar value for investment, but just even just in terms of raw capacity,
which is measured in the power consumption in gigawatts. There hasn't been a new industry of this level of electricity consumption for quite some time.
Coming up how the race to build data centers threatens our climate goals.
Today we'll be launching Australia's National Artificial Intelligence Plan. It is directed towards three national interest priorities.
Firstly, making sure that katan. Our leaders have been talking a lot about Australia becoming an AI hub and part of that is welcoming big investment in data centers. So tell me more about the scale the government and the industry has in mind. Yeah.
The National AI Plan, I think, focuses on a duller value of one hundred billion for data center investment in Australia and that really is globally significant.
Making sure that we're making AI technology here as well as taking the best of artificial intelligence technology into Australia to do important national interest things.
This is a trend we're seeing around the world. I'm based in Norway and the EU has been making similar noises talking about actively trying to attract investment around artificial intelligence. The government's AI plan really focused on productivity and the potential gains for the economy, and having read that plan, I think that it ignored some of the major potential downsides of that level of data center growth in such a short period of time.
Yeah, so tell me about some of those downsides.
There was a new report that came out from Australia Clean Energy Finance Corporation that examined both the upside and the downside of data center development, and it's really important because it shows that the potential upside, that is, if the data centers pay for renewable energy to cover basically all of their operations, the upside for emissions is not really that great. It's only a couple of percent reduction
in emissions thanks to data center growth. But the downside if data centers basically fail to bring sufficient renewable energy as they grow, and they grow much faster than projected, the downside is fifteen eighteen percent emissions increase for the power sector in Australia. So there's not a lot of emissions reductions potential, but there is a lot of potential emissions.
Worsening how much electricity will I require? And just as importantly, what is that going to mean for our power grid?
If you look at it as a sort of percentage change in the potential future total electricity consumption of all of Australia's grids, it's roughly on par with maybe sort of three to four percent that kind of range, And it can sound small, but it's important to put it in the context of the energy transition that's occurring at
the same time. That energy transition is occurring within those small percentage changes, right, So what happens is when you have a large number of new electric vehicles, for instance, competing for space on the power grid because they need to be charged. When you have new manufacturing facilities that are coming online making parts for clean energy, for instance, all of these different things are actually competing for space
on the power grid. And it's in that small percentage that all of these things jostle for connection rights to the grid or cheap access to electricity. And so that is why even though the level of change is around the same as we have for electric vehicles and electrification, it's still quite significant and has a significant impact because
the addition of those new data centers. The power grid also incentivizes increased generation from coal and gas to the extent where you can actually end up with coalfid power stations in particular seeking justification to extend their lifespan thanks to projections of increased power demand in the future, and
it's a real threat to climate goals. It was quite remarkable to see Australia's Climate Change Authority mention data center growth specifically as a reason why their initial suggestions of a stronger twenty thirty five climate target were kind of weakened down to a sixty two percent reduction from two thousand and five levels by twenty thirty five. So they actually suggested that there would be fewer emissions reductions available to Australia thanks to data center growth, and I think
that's significant. It doesn't mean that data centers were a whole story as to why these suggestions shifted, but the fact that it's become a factor that is big enough to mention in a report like that suggests that something big is changing.
The government says these data centers are critical infrastructure and that this industry is important for our modern economy. So is it possible to get those benefits without blowing out the energy transition.
Yes, absolutely for sure. And so there's a few different things you can do. First of all, you can mandate what's known as high quality renewable energy for curement. That's an awful word, salad, I'm sorry, but just to explain it,
it means. It means forcing the companies that are building data centers to make sure that they are well and truly funding, at the very least the same amount of new power demand that they create with the same amount of renewable energy, so not like a small fraction of it, but the same amount and if not more. That's the basic first step. And then the next step, of course, is to actually try and ensure that the growth of
power demand is itself limited or controlled or justified. This is much thornier and it's something that societies haven't really tackled with because data centers are not clear about the
purpose that they serve. You can build a data center that helps the hospital run its computers, but you can also build a data center that creates a billion sloppy images of awful things on social media, right, and so it's unclear what's doing what, and so the level of social usefulness comes into this is it's a really important thing.
I think I saw a billion of those sloppy images in my Instagram feed this morning. Yeah, good time. Given the government is making these huge bet on data centers, does that mean that the dream of us becoming a major exporter of renewables is now dead?
No, not necessarily. It's just a question of what we want to use our resources for. You could argue that Australia becoming a major data center hub for the world is a form of renewable energy export. It's just the manufacture of data rather than the manufacturer of steel, because data is of course sent overseas. But I think that's a weak argument because again when you look at the systemic effects, what we see around the world where data center growth is the fastest is that fossil fuels end
up being incentivized. And so it really comes down to a question not so much of dreams of export or what we do about our position in the world in terms of energy, but what we do with domestic choices, what we do with domestic energy. These are really really thorny questions and I think it's actually nice to see them now being asked. Thanks to the creation of such a new and sudden industry that consumes a lot of
electrical energy. Australia owns its resources of the solar power that falls upon its surface or the wind that blows across its surface, and these are questions about what to do with resources, just as Australia face those same questions when it discovered vast amounts of in gas. This is something that needs to be asked. Is it worthwhile to use those resources to help decarbonize Asia or to run
the creation of a thousand videos. This is really really important stuff and I don't want to come across as to oppose to data center growth. I just think that those questions need to be asked for a healthy and democratic conversation to be had, because if the worst case does happen, if data center growth goes out of control, then the dream of becoming an energy exports superpower is well and truly dead, and that would be a bad.
Outcomes an Thank you so much for speaking with us, no worries, thanks for having me. Also in the youth, former US President Barack Obama has called the killing of a thirty seven year old nurse in Minneapol a heartbreaking tragedy and a wake up call to every American. There are now growing calls for an investigation into the killing of Alex Preddy by federal immigration officers. In a statement, the Obamas said ICE agents in Minnesota can not operate
it in a lawful or accountable way. And thousands of people attended Invasion Day rallies across the country yesterday, calling to change the date of Australia Day or abolish it all together. In Melbourne, more than a thousand people gathered at Camp Sovereignty for a dawn service. The event featured speeches, dances, and historical accounts of violence against First Nations people. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.