Greetings from the ANU Energy Update 2026 subtitled "
Beyond Hormuz - Australia and the new energy geopolitics". Things are moving fast in the energy sector, with the title already out of date, the geopolitics having shifted focus to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. More locally, Anthropic has
announced a $31bn data centre in western Queensland, which will require a considerable amount of energy. I am in the room at the Australian National University, but the event is also available live online.
Taking the second point first, the Anthropic facility will likely to contract for its own renewable supply, use its own batteries, and supplement this with locally extracted gas.
Essentially, a data center is a large shed, built on a concrete pad. There will need to be a lot of plumbing for cooling, & power installed. After than racks of equipment are trucked in, bolted down & plugged in. After being built, a few people are needed to guard the premises, clean & carry out maintenance. The programmers & other software staff are elsewhere. So there will be very few long term jobs in Queensland, or Australia, from the facility.
Some data centers dispense with the big shed & simply put the computers in shipping containers, looking much like a big battery.
One area which might take off in Australia is
plug-in solar panels. In Europe these are seen as being for balconies of apartments. However, in Australia they may become popular for detached houses. The practical limit for a plugin system is about 7 square meters of panels. This is about as much as you can hang off a balcony & as much as the household wiring can easily carry. However, adding a battery to the system could provide all the off peak energy a small home needs. One potential application would be a standalone
solar carport to charge an electric car.
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