Our hydro deserves better than a chatbot — Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison
Last week, the Tasmanian Greens announced they’ll move for an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the AI data centres going up across the north of the state. I think this is a very good idea. These projects appear to have been approved without any specific regulations or parliamentary oversight, and the public has barely had the chance to have a say. The announcement also put a new number on the record: in Budget Estimates, under Greens questioning, Energy Minister Nick Duigan confirmed Firmus plans to draw 400 to 500 MW across two or three “AI factory” sites, which is more than Bell Bay Aluminium’s 335 MW, currently the state’s single biggest power user.<br>A lot of people seem convinced Tasmania can become some kind of “AI Island”. We’ve supposedly got cheap hydro power, and the world apparently wants somewhere clean to run artificial intelligence. So we sell ours as “green compute” and the investment rolls in. That’s the theory, anyway. The Premier loves it, and so does a Singaporean startup called Firmus.<br>One of the core problem with this is the power. We don’t uniformly have a surplus to sell. Last year we were importing electricity from Victoria just to keep our own lights on, and the government wants to hand about a sixth of the grid to a handful of foreign-owned sheds full of NVIDIA chips. What we get back is a few dozen permanent jobs, a stack of environmental claims nobody has audited, a great deal of noise, and a contract we’re not allowed to read. It’s a bad deal, and it’s being pushed and pushed and pushed.<br>And to be clear, this isn’t anti-AI. You can use AI, like it, even love it, and still think this plan is a bad deal for Tasmania. You can love electronics and still not want a lithium mine next door. Whether you’re for or against it barely matters here. What matters is whether handing a foreign company a big slice of our grid, water and goodwill is worth it for the people who actually live here. There are better ways to get a few dozen jobs, and most don’t rely on a huge chunk of our power grid, and lots of concerning impacts on things.<br>The spare power isn’t there<br>Let’s start with the Regulator’s own numbers. In the 2024-25 water year Tasmania imported 1,983 GWh from the mainland and exported just 433, a net 1,550 GWh flowing into the state, most of it made by burning brown coal and gas in Victoria. We were a net importer across Basslink for nearly every month of the year, hydro inflows were the third-lowest on record since we joined the national market, and we ran the gas plant to get through. The renewable surplus this whole scheme leans on wasn’t actually there. As one local writer put it, the grid is “tight. Not abundant and infinite. Tight.”<br>If we weigh that against the demand… well, it doesn’t look great. Firmus’s Launceston factory is contracted for 104 megawatts on its own, about what the entire Boyer paper mill draws, in a single building. Across its three sites at St Leonards, Bell Bay and Wesley Vale, Firmus is heading for 400 to 500 MW. The reporting on the Bell Bay plans put the combined Launceston-and-Bell-Bay figure at close to 15 per cent of everything the Tasmanian grid can supply, and even that only holds “unless new wind, solar or hydro generation is built.”<br>So this amazing AI data centre plan relies on a fleet of new generators that don’t exist yet, on a timeline nobody has guaranteed, which may or may not happen. Until they’re built, every megawatt that goes to a data centre is one taken off someone else.<br>Taken from the industries already in the queue<br>There’s already a queue for that power, too. Firmus was waved through for its 104 megawatts, but our own industry (industry that’s already here, doing useful things) has been told to wait. The Boyer paper mill, which employs around 300 people in Tasmania, has been trying to get off its coal-fired boiler. The conversion needs an extra 45 to 60 megawatts, and Hydro Tasmania told the mill the capacity wasn’t there.<br>So the rules bend for the right foreign investor, making something of spurious value, but not for an existing industry that already has some form of demonstrable value and jobs. Greens leader Dr Rosalie Woodruff put the contradiction to Parliament directly:<br>“How is it possible that established industries in Tasmania aren’t able to get additional power generation, but a Singaporean company who walks in and suggests a $2-billion investment are able to whistle up what they need?”<br>— House of Assembly, 25 March 2026
Every gigawatt-hour we sign over to AI is one that can’t get Boyer off coal, expand Bell Bay Aluminium, or electrify our homes and cars and bring people’s bills down along the way. We’d be rationing power to...