Civic Interplay / Facts and Moments
The following cards have been generated from a close reading of Transmission Planning Reports from Australian State Governments. They are saved as moments and observations on a fast changing field. The time of observation is captured.
17 cards, 3 held · 1 night of tracking
Data centre load accounts for 66 per cent of the growth in NSW end-use energy consumption from FY26 to FY35.
The fine print Verbatim from the executive summary panel. It is 66% of growth in end-use consumption, not of consumption. The decade it is measured against also contains electrifying transport, heating and industry; everything else combined is the other third.
In twelve months, Transgrid's forecast of data centre load growth to 2035 went up four times.
The fine print Quoted as "now forecast at 4x 2025 Transmission Annual Planning Report data centre forecasts". The same operator, one year apart. Any planning assumption formed from the 2025 report is wrong by a factor of four.
NSW's grid operator has received data centre connection enquiries totalling 20 gigawatts, roughly twice the entire state's peak demand.
The fine print Important. These are enquiries, not commitments. Transgrid states plainly that some are speculative or duplicated across networks, which is why Baringa was commissioned to de-duplicate. Never report this as approved or committed capacity. This is the card most likely to be attacked, and the caveat must travel with it.
City of Moreton Bay has published 16,519 development applications since 2016. The word "data" appears in none of them.
The fine print The index was verified working against controls (DWELLING 3,302, INDUSTR 402), but has not been independently checked. The council hosts Supernode, a data centre and battery campus reported at $2.5 to 3bn whose planning approval was announced by the Deputy Premier. The count is over application descriptions, not permit documents.
One grid operator's annual report says "data centre" 187 times. A decade of one council's planning applications says it zero.
The fine print The energy system has a word for these facilities and the planning system does not. Queensland consents them as "utility installation" or "high impact industry".
A 113-page engineering report for Australia's largest proposed data centre states its grid connection, 2,160 MVA, and never once states how much electricity it will use.
The fine print No PUE, no WUE, no kWh, no MWh anywhere in 113 pages. A connection size is how big the pipe is, not how much flows through it, and with no efficiency figure stated, one cannot be derived from the other.
The same report discloses 16.5 kilolitres a day of operating water. It discloses twenty times that for construction.
The fine print Construction demand is around 322 kL/day plus around 200 kL/day dust suppression, and 26.9 ML one-off per building to commission the closed loop.
The capital investment value recorded for an Amazon data centre in Western Sydney is $14.7 million.
The fine print Important. The figure is from the statutory feed and is almost certainly correct as the regulation defines it. The claim is not that anyone understated anything; it is that the statutory figure and what a hyperscaler actually spends are different measurements.
Of 94 Australian data centres tracked, one has both a disclosed value and a recorded approval date.
The fine print Partly a statement about the tracker rather than the world.
Supernode's planning approval was announced in July 2022. ChatGPT launched that November.
The fine print Primary source, ministerial statement, date on the document. The consent now underwriting a hyperscale AI campus was granted before the public conversation about AI infrastructure existed.
Street View, 2026. The site of a $3 billion data centre campus. The transmission towers on the horizon are the reason it is worth anything.
NSW minimum demand stops falling in 2029 and turns back up, because of data centre load.
The fine print They are not a bigger version of existing demand; they are a different kind of load, and they change the hardest problem in a solar-heavy grid.
In 2025 Queensland's transmission planner reported "limited interest from data centre proponents" and left them out of its load forecast entirely.
The fine print The full sentence is "with minimal enquiries or developments progressing beyond preliminary stages", and the conclusion is "Powerlink has not included specific data centre projects into the current load forecast." This is the network planner for the state that now hosts both Supernode and the largest data centre proposed in Australia.
AEMO projected 90 GWh a year of data centre consumption for all of Queensland. One proposed site is around a hundred times that.
The fine print SOURCED for the 90 GWh; the comparison is this project's arithmetic, so the card sits at the lower of the two. State the assumptions. Western Downs is 1,440 MW of IT load (4 × 360 MW). At 8,760 hours and a 70% load factor that is around 8,800 GWh a year, about 98× the 90 GWh figure. Load factor is an assumption, not a disclosure; the record states no consumption figure at all, which is card 06. Say so.
Queensland's current published transmission forecast contains no data centre projects. Its data is current as at September 2025.
The fine print SOURCED for the quote; UNVERIFIED that no 2026 edition exists, which rests on a search rather than on a statement from Powerlink. This is not a claim that Powerlink is unaware. They almost certainly hold current enquiry data they have not published.
In March 2026 NSW's grid operator reported 10 GW of data centre connection enquiries. By its annual report later that year: 20 GW.
The fine print The March submission also says around 6 GW of that was "progressing at pace" to a formal application, which is the honest answer to how much of the 20 GW is real, and Transgrid compares that 6 GW to building a Renewable Energy Zone the size of Central-West Orana.
Data centres connecting to NSW transmission range from 250 MW to over 1,200 MW, averaging 650 MW. Smaller ones connect to the distribution network instead.
The fine print A data centre connects straight to transmission, which is what both Queensland sites do, and why Victoria's planner separately counts "small distribution connected data centres".
