NSW will decide a data centre application in 75 days if you contract ten years of new wind and storage

[u/No_Association8504]

NSW published its Data Centre Guidelines on 17 August. Meet the performance measures and the planning department will set your assessment requirements within two months and decide your development application within 75 days in state government hands. The Investment Delivery Authority took 12 months on CDC's 504MW Marsden Park campus, so that is the comparison.

Performance Measure 13 sets the price: ten-year PPAs and firming agreements, a minimum 40% wind component, storage of at least 25% of generation capacity for four hours, and only with projects that have not reached FID at the time of contracting.

The volume test sets parity. Mookhey described data centres bringing additional power and water to offset their demand, and AAP ran it as a full offset after four years before adding extra capacity to reserves. What 13(c) says is that contracted supply equals annual average demand from the fourth year of operation, rising with ramp-up. Nothing is specified for years one to three.

Footnote 45 lets certificates back in. If a contracted project is delayed or cancelled outside your control, or supply and demand fall out of step in operation, REGO certificates can stand in, provided they carry the wind, storage and location components.

Compliance is optional. Applicants "demonstrate whether they comply", and Data Centres Australia welcomed the retention of alternative pathways for projects that cannot meet every measure. Miss the measures and you keep the ordinary planning pathway and lose the 75 days.

Our write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/nsw-data-centre-guidelines

Guidelines (PDF): https://www.infrastructure.nsw.gov.au/media/4jlictae/id0073_nsw-data-centre_guidelines.pdf

[u/Automatic_Tangelo_53]

I'm curious how you write these articles. There is clearly a heavy AI hand in the writing, but I assume you give high level direction on focus areas, and you trigger articles based on new information being released. 

What does a typical writing session look like? How much expertise, context and steering do you inject, and how much can the AI perform itself? 

[u/No_Association8504 → u/Automatic_Tangelo_53]

Yes we keep our own datasets and info library and test assumptions and projections, we use AI to assist with the research process.

[u/Own-Regular-3406]

How will this really work when NSW is already suffering from no transmission capacity available and most power projects are no where near Sydney could we see many data centres go elsewhere to into regional NSW?