Energy-guzzling data centres will be forced to wind down power use at peak times to guard against blackouts or strain on the grid, Labor has insisted, as it says it must not spurn the advantage of the AI boom as the nation did with its abundant gas supply.
As attitudes towards AI harden in the US, where states are enacting construction moratoriums, Labor’s AI guru Andrew Charlton said Australia’s approach should be “neither boosterism nor alarmism”, as hundreds of millions of dollars of computing investment in NSW and Melbourne prop up Australia’s sluggish economy.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with Andrew Charlton. Kate Geraghty Charlton, assistant minister for science and technology, has announced a “triple-lock” set of obligations to make sure the hundreds of planned physical cloud storage hubs can sustainably fit into the energy grid, at a time when ageing fossil fuel plants and the push to renewables have stoked reliability fears.
In a speech to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night, Charlton emphasised that tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon would be expected to “support the [power] system through demand flexibility, to be a grid asset rather than a grid burden.
“That means they must bring their own generation, not draw down everyone else’s. We expect them to pay their full share of grid connection, so those costs are never passed to households and businesses,” Charlton said, accord
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