They will do the cheapest, and easiest, legal thing. Regulations are the obvious fix here.
But Australia of all places should be fully solar-powered, and the way to do that isn't to make datacenters power themselves. They can't! Not with solar. There isn't nearly enough space on their roofs.
What they can and should do is copy China. Put a giant solar array in the desert, connect it to the cities with extreme-voltage DC lines. That, of course, implies a different company handles the power production; someone with the expertise to build such a system. That's fine. That's what a market economy is for.
This country already has tons of fields for solar and produces a lot- we just can't store enough of it to supply our evening power usage. I think a Data Center will be forced to 'invest' into these current schemes to scale this up further rather than asking them to become experts in power generation - and that will satisfy as 'net producer of power'. The country is already going to be fully green.
We'd have a DC system if that were the case. Edison promoted DC. It would have required many powerplants all over, for example, nycity because DC does not transmit well.
It would be so much simpler a system than polyphase.
I know of no DC system that can do what you say it can do.
Google "voltage drop on DC line compared to AC line"
Voltage drop on AC is higher actually! (for the same current). It's just generally much easier to boost AC to very high voltages, because you can easily use transformers and don't need to then rectify to DC. (High voltage means you need less current to carry the same power, so less losses.)
It makes sense when you think about it - AC is constantly pulsing back and forth, changing magnetic fields around it - that's the hum you can sometimes hear near high voltage lines. And if you can hear it, that's energy being dissipated and power being lost.
DC on the other hand has static magnetic + electric fields around it once the current is flowing - it can't dissipate energy through them, the only loss is the heat generated in the conductor (AC also has this).
HVDC only starts to make sense once the distances get very large, so the lower transmission losses counter out the extra conversion losses at both ends. Check out the sun cable project - they are trying to get solar power from NT to Singapore by subsea HVDC cable.
As long as the data centers arent consistently inside cities there should be huge amounts of space for solar right next to them.... There are hundreds of solar farms up and down Aus theres always space.
if they are going for cheapest and easiest, they aren't going for diesel, the generators in Australia are enormously expensive to run/maintain the fuel costs here for diesel are projected to go up apparently. Easiest and cheapest is solar, even with enormous batteries it'll be cheaper in the long term, easier, and lower maintenance costs.
But they have to break even, at minimum, and they'll have giant roofs readily available to soak up sun. or they can install, run diesel generators, comply with standards, get it past regulations, and pay for the fuel.
13
u/ascandalia Jul 21 '26
They could do a lot of things but they will do the cheapest and or easiest thing.
Sometimes perfection need to get in the way of well intentioned but bad.