Highlights from the Australian market
- The Albanese Government has softened its east coast gas reservation policy, replacing a fixed 20% mandatory reservation on LNG exporters with a cap of up to 20% determined by the Australian Energy Regulator.
- Natural gas production has begun in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Basin – a milestone eight years in the making since the NT’s fracking moratorium was lifted in 2018 – with the NT government anticipating up to $17 billion in economic value from the project over the next two decades.
- Something closer to home: Sydney’s International Convention Centre is being fitted with roughly 4,500 new rooftop solar panels, creating the largest solar farm in any city centre in the Southern Hemisphere and cutting the venue’s carbon emissions by up to 2,000 tonnes a year.
- Transgrid’s newly released 2026 Transmission Annual Planning Report shows NSW data centre demand forecasts have quadrupled since last year’s report, with data centres now expected to reach around 3.5GW of peak demand by 2035 and drive 66% of all growth in the state’s end-use electricity consumption over the next decade.
- Transgrid has also effectively put up a “house full” sign for new data centres in Sydney, revealing it has received 20GW of connection requests over two years but signed just 1.5GW, and is now steering data centre owners toward regional NSW until major transmission upgrades complete around 2035.
News from Japan
- Australia’s ambassador to Japan, Andrew Shearer, used a Japan National Press Club address to call for deeper Australia-Japan energy cooperation, framing the push partly around concerns over China’s growing economic coercion in the region.
- Paywalled: Chugoku Electric Power’s Shimane Nuclear Power Station Unit 3 – a 1.37GW reactor that began construction in 2006 but was halted after Fukushima in 2011 – is on track to clear safety inspections and become the first new nuclear unit to come online in Japan, with operation expected by FY2030.
- Paywalled: Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Germany’s RWE are installing a 30 MW-class hydrogen mono-firing gas turbine in northern Germany, capable of running on 100% hydrogen or co-firing with LNG at various ratios, with the trial run set to begin within FY2026.
Podcast of the week
Catalyst with Shayle Kann asks whether data centers actually increase electricity prices; the answer is more nuanced than it first appears, with data centres able to lower local utility rates even as they contribute to rising grid costs elsewhere.