MARK RILEY: Chris Bowen’s embarrassing backdown as green data dream takes major blow
MARK RILEY: Chris Bowen was determined not to let Queensland and the NT win the bitter fight to power data centres solely with renewable energy. He’s been forced into an embarrassing backdown.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen was taking no prisoners on Tuesday when he laid down the law on his renewables-only plan for data centres.
All the electricity used to power the plants would have to be more than offset by funding new renewable energy projects, he declared.
But Queensland and the Northern Territory were having none of it.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Unlike the other States and Territories, they own and operate their energy grids and want to maintain full autonomy over the mix of gas, coal and renewables that fire them.
That included powering data centres.
Bowen went on the attack.
If the recalcitrant jurisdictions refused to sign onto the Federal Government’s renewables-or-bust plan, then the Commonwealth would legislate to bust them.
Under the Constitution, the Federal Government can override State and Territory law and Bowen made clear the Albanese Government was more than prepared to pull that trigger if necessary.
In his mind, there was no way Queensland and the Northern Territory were going to win this defining battle of the Federal Government’s transition to renewables.
But just 24 hours later, they had.
Sitting at the National Cabinet table with Anthony Albanese and the other leaders on Wednesday, Queensland Premier David Crisafulli subtly declared victory.
Queensland and the Northern Territory had won crucial exemptions, retaining the rights to determine their own energy mix.
It was a major backdown by a Federal Government that had just hours earlier boasted about a “world first” set of uniform national standards that it was about to enforce on data centres to supercharge the green energy transition.
Crisafulli congratulated Albanese on his leadership in accepting that Queensland was a special case, which is the sort of simulated praise political opponents deliver when they’ve really put one over the other bloke.
On the floor of the Queensland Parliament at about the same time, Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie was being far less subtle.
“I would say to Bowen the bully from Canberra, we will not buckle to bullying,” he thundered.
Albanese tried to play down the significance of his Government’s capitulation.
He said National Cabinet had come to a “common position”. It had just done it “in a flexible way”.
The common position was that two of the jurisdictions were free to go their own uncommon ways.
That is more flexible than an Indian rubber man.
The joint communique issued by the meeting didn’t make one single mention of renewable energy.
Albanese insisted that the deal had forged unity on the central political objective. It would not drive up household energy prices.
But that, too, was in direct contradiction to what Bowen had warned just the previous day.
He had said the Queensland proposal would hike the State’s wholesale electricity prices by 13 per cent.
“Queensland doesn’t get to set the policies of the rest of Australia, with all due respect,” Bowen said.
And one day later, with all due respect, Queensland is doing exactly that.
It will be interesting to hear from Bowen how a proposal that was going to spike power bills one day, apparently wasn’t the next.
This flexibility thing sounds pretty magical.
Albanese says he wanted to ensure Australia didn’t end up with eight different policies on data centre developments between the States and Territories.
And it hasn’t. It has ended up with two and possibly three when the differences between the heavily gas-reliant NT grid and Queensland’s coal, gas and renewables mix are taken into consideration.
Most of the 225 data centres in planning, though, will have to offset their energy use with new renewable projects in order to gain approvals in the majority of States.
And that raises another problem: timing.
Energy experts warn that it is much quicker to build a data centre than it is a solar or wind farm.
The expectation is that not all the requisite renewable projects will be feeding into the grid by the time the new data centres are sucking enormous amounts of electricity out of it.
That would really test the agreement’s flexibility to ensure what is now Bowen’s “renewables-only-kind-of-sort-of plan” retains its social licence.
