DATA CENTRES

Detailed summary

Special report · Energy & tech The cloud has a smokestack Every search, stream and AI prompt runs through a building that never sleeps. Australia is racing to build more of them than ever — and most still run on a grid powered by coal and gas. Animated illustration: a data centre drawing coal-fired power, […]

Australia is in the midst of a critical clean energy switch and data centre boom. So what’s that got to do with your fridge?

We’ve crunched the numbers for some of the most polluting data centre proposals in Australia. The scale is pretty bonkers, so we made this to show you what’s at stake.

Plugged into Australia’s grid, it creates about 0.22 tonnes of climate pollution a year.

Hard to imagine, but that’s 2× every fridge in every Australian home, running non-stop for a whole year.

That’s one in every five cars on Australia’s roads, driving for a whole year.

That’s 70% of all semi-trailers in Australia, hauling freight all year long.

It would take the entire nation 16 years to create the same amount of climate pollution.

Drawing power from the grid this one data centre produces 8.3 Megatons of CO₂. The proposal is the biggest in the country, with a total maximum power demand of 3.24 GW.

That translates to 3.1 million cars, 38 million fridges, 75 thousand heavy trucks or 16× Vanuatu’s entire emissions.

Opening of the article, excerpted from Climate Council. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.