Queensland Premier David Crisafulli has promised residents that attracting data centres to the state will lower household power prices.
The claim follows Queensland being granted an exemption to a national plan that would force data centres to fund newly built renewable energy to power themselves with.
👀Odd ones out: Every state and territory except Queensland and the Northern Territory agreed to the renewable energy data centre plan at last month's National Cabinet.
The Queensland Government's technology-agnostic approach allows data centres to run on coal and gas.
💡 The pitch: Crisafulli's pitch is to charge data centres more for electricity generated from Queensland's state-owned coal and gas plants, using that money to cover generation and maintenance costs so households don't have to.
Alison Reeve, program director of energy and climate change at the Grattan Institute, told the National Account she's sceptical, partly because there's still no detail on what data centres will actually be asked to pay, or how that compares with other states.
🗣️"When you do have that level of ownership, you can decide to effectively subsidise the electricity for everybody," Reeve said.
Queensland already owns its own power generation and network, meaning the government could cut prices directly without needing data centres involved at all.
⛏️Where does the power come from? About 60 percent of Queensland's electricity is generated from coal, with gas adding a further 10 percent.
The remaining 30 percent is made of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar.
🏢The first big tenant: Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, has signed on as a long-term tenant of a $32 billion data centre near Dalby, in Queensland's Western Downs region.
At full capacity, the site could use as much electricity as 1.5 million homes, about a quarter of the state's total demand.
Reeve said if new power generation isn't built, Queenslanders will see their power prices rise.
🗣️“Much depends on how long it takes to ramp up to full capacity versus when that new generation is built,” Reeve said.
Watch the National Account's Archie Milligan below:
Thumbnail: AAP