Craig Scroggie

If you're at hospital, your radiology, your pathology, your scans, your MRI, they're all going into digital systems that live in a data center.

If you are having robotic surgery from a da Vinci machine and you're in a hospital, it's coming out of a supercomputer that's hosted in a data center.

So all of those infrastructure assets require energy to run them.

And the key role for us over time is to continue to

help the energy transition and that is support the efficiency of the efficient use of energy and obviously the development of more solar wind and battery because data centers don't only operate during the day we need firm energy and that firm energy traditionally in australia for our communities would have come from coal and gas and over time it will need to increasingly come from new renewable sources and that will be large-scale battery developments

Well, in the US, that is the question that gets asked.

Does my consumer power bill go up as a result of more infrastructure being built?

In Australia, actually, when we build these assets, the substations, transmission infrastructure, we actually have to pay for it.

So the opposite is generally going to be true, and that is that as our power load gets larger, we will pay a larger share of the shared infrastructure cost for consumers.

So we have to pay the establishment cost of the infrastructure so the consumer doesn't pay that.

The consumer gets the benefit of using the community infrastructure that we have to build, whether it's sewer, recycled water, or more electricity infrastructure.

And then we obviously pay a larger share as our consumption of power increases over time.

So in Australia, over time, it will mean lower power costs, not higher.

Well, the first principle to start with is that the technology that we are consuming and using is solving problems, whether it's in medicine, healthcare, community.

I mean, every industry is benefiting today from the production of knowledge.

So when the facts change and when you think about views and goals that are set in relation to carbon targets and other things that the government would need to consider,

When the community and the technology use of artificial intelligence is driving up demand, that means that the way that we support that and the scale of the infrastructure is going to change as well.

So the first point I would make is that in the ordinary course of any industrial revolution, and this is one that we're going through now, the facts change.

when the facts change and we make decisions in relation to the type of energy.

I think the point, Alan, that I'm trying to make is that