A 1 GW data centre planned on a cattle station in the Australian outback has lost its start date. Energy North, the developer of Project Ares at Murranji Station in the Northern Territory's Barkly Region, about 683 km south of Darwin, told Reuters this week that it is no longer working to the first-power date of 28 June 2028 given in its filings. Daniel Hunter, its vice president of project development, called that date an indicative schedule at the time of lodgement.
A regulator waiting for Canberra
The trigger was a ruling of the Northern Territory Environment Protection Authority on 7 October. The authority suspended its usual seven-week deadline for deciding which assessment hurdles the project must clear and said it would first seek advice from the federal government, which is still working out its policy expectations for data centres and AI infrastructure. It set no new timeframe. It has already decided that Project Ares needs a full environmental impact statement, the highest level of assessment under the Territory's Environment Protection Act 2019, and the project also needs Commonwealth environmental approval.
The authority listed ten potential impacts, among them strain on water systems and disruption to Aboriginal sacred sites, and said it had low confidence in the measures proposed to manage the significant ones. Hunter said the timing would be confirmed once the terms of the impact statement are set, and that the development phase has so far been funded by the founder.
Gas, solar and batteries, with no grid behind them
The campus would not be connected to any grid. Construction Review Online, working from the project documents, describes 1 GW of IT capacity in two phases of 500 MW, a 1,038 MW gas-fired power plant meant to supply both firm and backup power and described as hydrogen-ready, about 3,000 MWp of tracking solar PV on 6,000 to 7,000 hectares, and battery storage of up to 16 GWh. Water would come from the Montejinni Limestone Aquifer, up to 4 gigalitres a year. The preliminary disturbance footprint is about 19,150 hectares, and up to 4,300 construction workers would live in a village on site.
Project Ares is not the only one. Beetaloo Energy has proposed a data centre near Darwin twice the size, which by its own estimate would burn up to 400 terajoules of gas a day. Reuters notes that the two projects together come to about ten times the peak demand of the Territory's grid. In Canberra, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has indicated that the national framework will require data centres to run on renewable energy and has ruled out exemptions for Queensland and the Northern Territory, both of which want to allow gas-powered sites.
For anyone who supplies power equipment to sites like this, the interesting line in the filings is the one that gives a single gas plant the job of both prime and backup supply. With no utility feed to fall back on, the plant's own redundancy is the backup, and the argument moves from how many standby units to install to how many engines or turbines can be out for maintenance at once. Then there is the road: 683 km of it, heat, dust and a long wait for spare parts. Off-grid campuses of this kind are what the Wärtsilä study we reported modelled, and they favour equipment that arrives ready to set down, like containerized power modules. None of that is decided while the regulator waits for Canberra.
Sources: bdnews24.com (Reuters), ESD News, Construction Review Online