Ketan Joshi

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112 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 7 Jun

Ketan Joshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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7am · Mega data centres in bed with big gas: how fossil fuels are powering the AI boom · 7 Jun 2026 podcast

There are real live projects with documents that you can read about and assess.

And even a small proportion of these data centers being powered by gas would result in a very, very material increase in the total emissions.

Just one in four data centers being powered by gas would be 2.4 times the emissions of just connecting them to the grid.

So in the Australian regulatory context...

A planning application has to report estimated future emissions, but these reports are not limited by regulation in any way.

So it's not like a company can report a very large amount of future emissions and then a planner might say, no, those emissions are simply too high.

This, of course, has been the context for various court cases in Australia.

So when a coal mine, for instance, is challenged on the basis that the coal that it digs up will be impacting climate change.

So there are efforts to try and make this a greater part of regulation.

What happens in Australia is that the only way a data center might actually end up having any type of regulatory limit on its emissions is if, say, for instance, it installs a gas-fired power station like that Cloud Carrier project,

It falls underneath this policy known as the safeguard mechanism, which implements limitations on their direct emissions, but they can simply buy as many carbon offsets as they want to comply with that regulation.

So it is a small financial penalty in the form of having to buy carbon offsets

that is not really impacting the facilities and the safeguard mechanism in that they just buy the offsets and they're not too bothered.

That is the only example I can think of where a data center might be limited.

So for instance, if a data center connects to the power grid and basically says in their planning application, we're going to be 100% renewables, and they do that using weak claims, they are not going to face any regulatory pushback whatsoever.

On the upside, the expectations that were announced by the government a few months back, one of them is actually to be 100% powered by renewable, new additional renewable energy.

the Australian Energy Markets Commission is investigating how to make that a real thing.

And so basically, if you have data centers that are forced to actually build or wait for sufficient new renewable energy that they have brought on on top of what else would have come online anyway, then you could actually end up with a situation where at least they cover off their own impacts.

So there might be eventually good regulation, but it has to be fought for

I think there will be some sort of law or limitation on the emissions or renewables claims of new data centre developers in Australia.

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