DATA CENTRES
Boolathana capable of delivering firm, 24/7 renewable power
for AI and data centres.
Always On
The world’s fastest-growing demand for electricity comes from the digital economy. And that demand is climbing fast. Global data centre electricity use is on track to reach around 1,300 terawatt-hours a year by 2035. The demand is driven by AI clusters that can draw up to ten times the power of a traditional server rack in the same space.
The data centres behind AI, cloud and computing need power that is constant, clean, and available every hour of the year. At the scale that matters, they arrive as campuses – clusters of buildings sharing one power supply, one water source and one security perimeter, drawing hundreds of megawatts between them. A grid connection delivers none of that reliably.
Grid power is contested. The same network serves households, hospitals and existing industry, the same connection queue governs everyone on it, and a gigawatt-scale load consuming capacity those users already depend on is the objection every large data centre now meets.
Nor does a renewable supply contract settle it. Most are matched annually – a year of renewable generation bought against a year of consumption – and the shortfall falls overnight, because the generation being bought is heavily solar. Google has matched its global consumption with renewable energy every year since 2017. Measured hour by hour, it reached 66% in 2024, after the largest single-year clean energy purchase in its history¹ In Asia-Pacific the figure is 12%. Singapore has since set a standard requiring new data centres to draw at least half their power from approved green sources, low-carbon ammonia among them, and excluding renewable certificates bought without direct procurement.² It is a standard the grid there cannot presently supply. Through the night, the electricity arriving is whatever the grid is producing, and that is usually coal or gas derived.
Most renewable sites cannot do that without vast oversized battery storage. At Boolathana most of that work is already done by the resource itself.
Boolathana’s wind and solar oppose each other hour by hour. Wind strengthens through the afternoon and holds through the night, across exactly the hours solar falls to zero, so generation arrives close to flat before a single battery is added.
A data centre on Boolathana could draw whatever it needed, whenever it needed it. What the resource does not supply, the platform is designed to make for itself: green ammonia, produced on the same site, and used for power when it is called on. Across the seven-year hourly record, only 11.4% of the energy delivered would come from dispatchable firing.
The result is a supply designed to be firm in every hour of the year, entirely renewable, with no grid behind the meter and no fossil fuel in the system.
Firm By Nature
2.5 megawatts of wind and solar for every megawatt of firm power delivered,
every hour of the year.
Firmness is normally something a project buys – banks of batteries, a backup generator, a grid connection to fall back on. At Boolathana the resource itself supplies most of it: wind and solar between them generate through almost every hour of the year. What remains is designed to be met from batteries and ammonia the platform makes itself, rather than from fuel brought in.
Matching steady demand against variable generation is called firming. It is not one problem but three, separated by how long the shortfall lasts – minutes, a night, or several days at a stretch. No single instrument answers all three. Batteries are right for the shortest, a passing cloud or a lull in the wind.
But a battery that covers a cloudy afternoon is a small fraction of one that would carry a site through six days. That is where off-grid projects fail – not for want of a good resource, but because covering the longest shortfall with batteries alone costs more than the power is worth.
On Boolathana, that shortfall is small enough to solve on site.
The design is a deliberate mix, 55.5% wind to 44.5% solar, chosen to maximise the combined capacity factor and reduce the firming task to its minimum, with daytime battery storage reducing it further. For continuous renewable power generated entirely on site, the resulting overbuild is low – and it is the quality of the resource, not the scale of the equipment, that achieves it. Across the seven-year record, combined output fell to zero for a maximum of twelve hours — a single mid-winter overnight, set out in full on The Resource.
What remains is the extended lull. This is where the industry falls back on fossil fuel: a diesel or gas reserve is standard for exactly this, which is why almost no continuous renewable supply is genuinely free of it. Because the platform would already be producing green ammonia, sustaining supply through a lull of that length would need no additional storage fleet – only a tank of the fuel the site would be making in any case.
More Than One Business
One resource, more than one product. Each strengthens the case for the others.
A resource this firm can support more than one business.
The green ammonia plant and a data centre are the first two, independent of each other, sharing one platform, and each makes the other more bankable.
For the ammonia, the data centre is an anchor customer from first production: captive demand taken across the fence, with no shipping, no export terminal, no exposure to export-market timing, and no third-party counterparty.
It is demand the platform controls itself, committed from the start, the kind of early offtake a green ammonia project needs to reach a final investment decision.
For the data centre, the ammonia is the firming fuel. That is what makes the supply carbon-free in every hour rather than on average – the reserve is made inside the fence, from the same wind and sun that powers the site. The loop closes on itself.
Connectivity and Why Now?
Boolathana sits more than 800 kilometres closer to Singapore than Perth does, and nearer still to Jakarta.
The power case at Boolathana improves with time. The connectivity case does not.
Everything a campus would need here is either in place or buildable: the resource, the land, the water, the firming fuel. Connectivity is the one element GGE cannot deliver alone. Subsea capacity between Australia and Asia is being expanded through corridors that pass within reach of Boolathana’s coastline, and a branching unit and landing node added while a cable is being laid costs an order of magnitude less than retrofitting one afterwards. Once a cable is in the water, the cheapest route to a firmed, carbon-free gigawatt in the Indian Ocean basin closes for the economic life of that cable.
A second timetable runs alongside it. Australia’s Hydrogen Production Tax Incentive pays A$2 per kilogram of renewable hydrogen for ten years, and only to projects reaching an unqualified final investment decision before 1 July 2030. The ammonia that would firm a campus here is that hydrogen. A campus supplied from a project that misses that date would carry a higher power price for as long as it operates.
The site suits work that follows power rather than population: training large models, and processing bulk workloads where a few extra milliseconds are of no consequence. Work that must answer a user instantly belongs close to that user, and always will. Boolathana is not that site, and does not need to be.
Policy Fit
The rules are already written.
On 23 March 2026 the Australian Government published its Expectations of Data Centres and AI Infrastructure Developers, built around five national priorities: national interest, the clean energy transition, sustainable water use, skills and jobs, and local research capability.
Proposals aligned with them are prioritised in Commonwealth regulatory assessment; energy-intensive proposals that are not aligned will not be. In April, Microsoft signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing to those expectations alongside a A$25 billion Australian investment. In July the Government announced it intends to legislate standards built on the same framework.
Boolathana meets the energy and water expectations outright. Power that is carbon-free in every hour rather than on average, with no fossil reserve anywhere in the system. No competition for metropolitan potable water — the site desalinates its own from the Indian Ocean. No displacement of grid-served residential or industrial supply, because there is no grid behind the meter.
Singapore’s position is the same. Its Green Data Centre Roadmap recognises low-carbon ammonia as a green energy source, and its DC-CFA2 allocation requires new facilities to draw at least half their power from that list. The regulator of the region’s anchor market has already assessed the method Boolathana is built on.
Why Boolathana?
An measured resource, on ground nobody else can secure. Everything else follows from it.
Boolathana’s wind averages 8.89-9.02 metres per second at 150 metres, and it is strongest through the hours the sun is down. The resource has been measured, not assumed – independently characterised on site and The Resource sets it out in full.
The resource is not the whole advantage. It sits on one title with one counterparty, under a Section 91 licence with exclusive access held by separate deed, and no external network to depend on. Sites of this quality exist; sites of this quality that a counterparty can actually secure, on one title, do not.
The location answers two constraints a data centre cannot avoid: distance to market, and water. Boolathana sits close to the Asian markets where demand is growing fastest, markets that have run short of both power and water.
Water scales with the platform. Early requirements can be met from groundwater on site, and beyond that the coast provides seawater without practical limit, desalinated as needed. Water, the binding constraint across most of the region, is not a constraint here.
The platform is designed to scale in stages: a first campus of 250 megawatts, a staging post at one thousand, and the land, seawater and ammonia in place for several gigawatts beyond.
Contact us
Have any questions?
For enquiries about Gascoyne Green Energy or the GGE Boolathana Project please get in touch