Labor’s quest to attract power-hungry artificial intelligence data centres to Australia flies in the face of common sense and puts tech talk before the stability of our national energy grid.
Nationals Senator for New South Wales, Ross Cadell, said “Labor’s shiny obsession didn’t match the reality of an energy grid already on life support,” adding that Friday’s hearing of the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence heard directly from the Prime Minister’s own department that declared “it’s all going to be contingent on the onboarding of generation.”
“Labor’s green dream has left energy intensive industries on their knees, yet they want to bring more energy intensive industry into Australia” Cadell said.
“From Tomago in New South Wales to the Boyne Aluminium Smelter in Gladstone, and at Whyalla in South Australia, skyrocketing power prices have put jobs at risk and left the taxpayer on the hook to cover the failures of Chris Bowen and his Labor circus.
“Australia needs sovereign data capability, but it can’t come at the expense of taxpayers who are already spending billions to bail out industries that need secure and stable power.
“The only sustainable way to support data centres in Australia is by adding firm dispatchable power to the grid, through High Efficiency, Low Emissions (HeLe) coal and next generation nuclear power.
“The sheer scale of this green fuelled Labor fantasy is staggering.
“The recently announced Anthropic AI project in regional Queensland alone will demand 2.16 GW at peak and consume up to 18.9 TWh annually.
“A whopping five times the usage of every current data centre in Australia combined.
“We’re talking about the need to cover more than 28,000 rugby league fields with solar panels just to power this one centre, or more than 1,500 new wind turbines at a plate capacity of 33%.
“Labor is once again proving they will stop at nothing.
“First, it was 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines dashed through prime agricultural land, then it was fantasy fuelled offshore wind turbines, and now it is attempting to plug in jobless energy hungry sheds in the bush.
“It is time for Labor to stop the thought bubbles and start dealing in energy reality.
“You cannot run an advanced AI economy on a grid that only works when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.”
