He had excellent PR then.

Uh, yes.

He used to, he, he used to call fossil fuels, like, the craziest experiment, like, humans have ever done or something.

I think he copied that line from someone else.

Uh, but yeah, now he really likes fossil fuels quite a lot.

Uh, this is an important question, right? Like, what happens, what gets left behind, like the infrastructure that gets left behind, um, if, if the bubble pops, um, and all the money kind of dissipates.

Uh, and I think, you know, I, I mentioned renewable energy before, but I think the fossil fuel infrastructure is a really important one.

So yeah, it's-

Is that something that you've looked at as well?

Yeah, I have, and it's...

So this is an interesting little nuance here is that...

Carbon capture and storage can work in two different ways.

So I mentioned the trees and the big fan.

You can kind of have this third way where you have, let's just say you have a coal plant and you kind of have this chimney that just pumps out all the gases that get generated as a result of you burning stuff.

You can actually attach a machine to that exhaust pipe, right? Hypothetically capture all that exhaust pipe.

So do you want to tell us a bit about, like, why are data centres bad for the environment?

So what have you found looking into those claims?

Yeah, absolutely.

This is really important.

So a nice example is the Cloud Carrier Project in New South Wales.

That's a 700 megawatt facility gas-fired power station being proposed to run a data center to give you a sense of context for those emissions.

It's sort of similar to the Canada story I told before.

If that facility were to come online, as it's sort of written on paper, you would undo the projected emissions reductions for the entire state of New South Wales for 2028 with just the emissions from this one data center.

They

Do you have a feel for it?

It is a bit of an underestimate.

So we use the same figure in our Greenpeace Greenpeace report and it's the Australian energy market operator.

Right.

And I think this is a really useful exercise and I want to write about this soon, which is basically no one really knows what the demand from data centers will be in the future.

because there is a very, very large pipeline of projects and you kind of have to pick yourself using a subjective set of criteria, which ones you think are most likely to go ahead or not go ahead.

So the Climate Council was actually a little bit more, you know, they kind of looked at the whole pipeline um which is you know unadjusted right like basically like let's just assume that everything that's that's you know has like half of an idea uh actually goes ahead whereas we really trimmed it down to what the grid operator has subjectively assessed as being the most likely to go ahead which is about 10 of the projects right so there's like a pipeline of like 40 to 50 gigawatts of new data center demand which is like sort of about 1.5 times the total size of the current power grid to give you a sense of scale.

So

Okay, how does this actually work when it comes to the Australian regulatory context, though? So when projects come up for approval, what does the law actually require governments to consider on, on climate, on energy?

So in the Australian regulatory context, a planning application has to report estimated future emissions, but these reports are not limited by regulation in any way.

So it's not like a, a company can report a very large amount of future emissions and then, and then a planner might say, "No, th-those emissions are simply too high." Uh, this is, of course, has been the context for various court cases in Australia.

So, like, when a coal mine, for instance, is challenged on the basis that the coal that it digs up will be, will be impacting climate change.

So there are efforts to try and make this a greater part of regulation.

What happens in Australia is that the only way a data center might actually end up having any type of regulatory limit on its emissions is if, say, for instance, it installs a gas-fired power station like that Cloud Carrier project.

It falls underneath this policy known as the safeguard mechanism, which implements, uh, limitations on their direct emissions, but they can simply buy as many carbon offsets as they want to comply [laughs] with that regulation.

Um, so I mean, what do you see as the risks here if governments don't tighten the rules and, and what would a kind of a good system look like at this point?

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 3% to 4%, that kind of range.

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.

Gautam, given the government is making this huge bet on data centers, does that mean that the dream of us becoming a major exporter of renewables is now dead?