All low-emissions power options, including nuclear, should be on the table to capture what the head of a data centre company views as an AI-fuelled data storage opportunity for Australia.
NEXTDC chief executive officer Craig Scroggie says artificial intelligence and cloud computing are driving massive demand for data centres and Australia is well-placed to be a regional heavyweight if it can solve the “energy trilemma”.
“We need clean power, we need firm power, we need cheap power,” he said at The Australian Energy Nation Forum.
“In order for a modern economy to thrive, we have to solve the energy trilemma.”
The electricity-intensity of training and deploying AI models has been well-documented and was flagged as a challenge by the nation’s independent climate body, the Climate Change Authority, in its advice to the federal government on new emissions reduction targets.
Data centres could account for more than 10 per cent of Australia’s electricity use by 2035, Bloomberg modelling has projected.
Mr Scroggie believes Australia has the land and renewables resources to pursue a bigger data centre industry and should keep the door open to “everything” to power them without burdening climate goals, including nuclear power.
“I would look to my customer to give me advice,” he said, referring to the big tech companies pursuing nuclear energy, including a deal signed by Microsoft to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.
Nuclear power energy has been banned in Australia since the late 1990s.
The federal opposition took a plan to build seven plants to the last election, which they lost to Labor in a convincing defeat.
Federal Industry Minister Tim Ayres represented the government at the forum, where he spruiked plans to clean up industry under recently-announced national targets to slash emissions by 62-70 per cent by 2035.
“Industrial products like iron and steel, made using Australian energy processed here in Australia, are delivering emissions reductions for our industrial partners,” he said on Wednesday.
“That is an unmissable Australian opportunity.”
Senator Ayres would not be drawn on the future of power prices for businesses and households under a grid dominated by renewables.
“What the government does here matters in terms of the shape of the market in the future, and we’ve had 30 years of backwards and forwards,” he said.
Shadow treasurer Ted O’Brien, formerly the opposition’s energy and climate spokesperson, took aim at the economic modelling underpinning the 2035 climate targets.
He said the federal government had not adequately weighed up the costs of acting to cut emissions against the economic burden of of floods, fires and other impacts of unchecked climate change.
“Either the Labor Party hasn’t done that, or they’ve done it, and it’s so bad that they won’t show the Australian people.”
The opposition remains in internal turmoil on climate policy, with some members pushing to ditch net zero entirely.
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