By Nick O’Malley
Publication Date: 2025-12-10 06:20:00
“This dependency is not only driving up prices, but could also result in a 14 percent increase in grid emissions across the NEM (National Electricity Market). This is not specific to data center load, but an inherent result of load growth that is making power supply scarce in the short term.”
To mitigate most of these impacts, it said an additional 3.2 GW of renewable capacity would be required over the next decade, on top of the already expected wind and solar energy capacity – enough for almost 5 million Australian homes.
Credit: Matt Golding
“While this is challenging, if the right incentives were in place to enable this additional renewable energy generation to be built in this time frame, price increases would be capped at 7 per cent for NSW and 6 per cent for Victoria, with emissions increases eliminated,” it said.
“Price increases could be further reduced by introducing additional flexibility through the deployment of an additional 1.9 GW of large battery storage systems.”
The…
