Apartment Complex Electrification in a Vault With a Chef

Greetings from the "Vault" in Fishwick, Canberra, for the "Apartment Complex Electrification - Information Session". The vault is a windowless concrete structure, on a secured industrial site, looming like something from an action movie. Inside the Vault is an industrial kitchen, complete with a chef. As I walked in someone said "High Tom good to hear you on radio". 

This all distracted me from the public servants presenting on the Apartment Complex Electrification project. Some time ago I was on a working group advising the Chief Minister how to reduce energy use in the ACT. We focused on apartments as there were already programs for houses. But it turns out this is difficult for technical, legal and social reasons, thus the pilot program. 

After a few minutes it was explained the chef is demonstrating cooking on a low energy induction cooktop. The food was excellent.

The call for applications from apartment buildings to participate in the pilot will be released Monday.

Talking About Data Center AI Energy Use on Sky News

Tom Worthington, interviewed at Parliament House
on Sky News, 19 January 2024

This week I was interviewed at Parliament House for a news item on data centers and their expanding energy use ("Tech companies spending billions to meet data centre demand", Brent O'Halloran, Sky News 19 January 2024). 

There are boom times in Australia, and world wide for data centers. Microsoft alone is planning nine new data centers in Australia. One reason is AI increasing the computing capacity needed, which is also increasing the processing required at data center, and thus energy use.  therefore power needed.

One way around the power use problem is to collocate the data centers with big batteries, at transmission line nodes from renewable energy zones. I talked about this at a conference in Singapore last year. One example is the Brendale Supernode in Queensland.

Australian Coal Exports to China to Drop in 2025

Greetings from "Coal consumption in China" by Jorrit Gosens, creator of the "China Energy Portal" at the Australian National University. He predicts that by 2025 China will be able to meet much more of its requirements for coal domestically for energy and steel production. This is due to improvements in rail lines to get coal from west to east. 

Australia can sell much of its surplus coal China doesn't need, to Japan and South Korea, but not all. In the longer term coal consumption in China will go down, but it is unclear by how much, as Chinese provincial governments like to "build stuff".