A parliamentary inquiry in New South Wales has called for data centres in Australia's most populous state to be legally required to supply their own 100% renewable electricity on an hourly basis. The report, released on 5 November, goes well beyond the state government's current guidelines and would be the strictest rule of its kind in Australia.
The inquiry was run by the NSW Legislative Council's Public Accountability and Works Committee and chaired by Greens MP Abigail Boyd. It was highly critical of the state's fast-tracked planning regime for data centres, according to RenewEconomy.
Hourly matching instead of annual averages
The key recommendation would make data centres account for the source of their electricity hour by hour, including at times of peak demand, rather than balancing renewable purchases against consumption over a whole year. The committee said operators should be "legally mandated to supply their own 100% renewable energy on an hourly basis at a minimum", PV Tech reported.
That is a significant step up from the guidelines the NSW government published in August. According to the state's climate and energy department, those guidelines aim to "achieve an average 80% correlation between new electricity supply and a constant demand". They also ask data centres to show they can cut up to 25% of their estimated average load for up to two hours using batteries and load shifting, without diesel generators.
Boyd said that under the current rules, around 20% of data centres' energy needs would still come from coal and gas. She described the pipeline of planned projects as "astonishing in scale" and said data centres were "threatening to consume incomprehensibly large volumes of energy and water to feed their demands".
"Data centres are increasing greenhouse gas emissions right now as we speak," she said.
Boyd also called for a moratorium on new data centre approvals, but this was voted down by Labor and Liberal MPs on the committee. The NSW government had not commented on the report at the time of publication.
Why the grid is watching
Network operator Ausgrid told the inquiry that data centres make up about 4% of the NSW operational load today and could reach 17% to 30% by 2040. The Smart Energy Council estimated that connecting 5 GW of data centres without matching new supply could add AU$40 billion (US$28 billion) to wholesale costs across the four eastern states, including AU$8.9 billion in NSW.
Operator AirTrunk estimated that every additional gigawatt of data centre demand needs about 3 GW to 4 GW of new renewable capacity to run around the clock. In July, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said large data centres should be legally required to be net renewable generators, with legislation targeted for early 2027.
What it means for Asia-Pacific developers
Hourly matching would turn data centres from buyers of annual renewable certificates into customers for firmed supply: solar combined with batteries, wind and other flexible capacity that can deliver power through the evening and overnight. If NSW or the federal government adopts the rule, developers able to offer solar-plus-storage contracts shaped to a constant load would be best placed to win the next wave of corporate deals in Australia's largest power market.
Source: RenewEconomy (AAP), PV Tech
