Global private investment fund Quinbrook Infrastructure has been given the green light to build a $2.5-billion data-storage facility in south-east Brisbane.
The supernode facility, to be built on a 30ha site in Brendale, 20km north of Brisbane, will become a multi-tenanted campus for data storage and one of the largest green data-storage facilities in the southern hemisphere.
The site will connect directly to the adjacent South Pine substation at Brendale—the central node of the Queensland electricity network.
It will host third-party data-centre operations and be powered by wind and solar farms, backed up by a 2000mW-hour battery that will help stabilise the grid in the region around Moreton Bay, one of the leading regions for rooftop solar uptake.
The battery would have a maximum power output of 700 to 800mW.
Acting Queensland premier Steven Miles described the venture as “one of the major new economy projects coming to Queensland”, driven by the state government’s investment in digital technology infrastructure and renewable energy.
That includes $15 million to support the Sunshine Coast’s new international undersea fibre-optic connection intended for uses such as efficient, large-scale data storage.
The 550km cable, which entered service in May, connects the Sunshine Coast to the 7000km Japan-Guam-Australia South submarine cable and allows Queensland businesses to connect with Asia and the US without going via the Sydney hub.
The proposed facility will intersect with the new international subsea data cable, directly connecting the Queensland capital to the global cloud for the first time.
The project will be built in four stages, with Quinbrook targeting financial closure on the first phase, costing $700 million to $800 million, by the end of June, 2023.
The facility will host up to four hyper-scale data centres and three separate high-voltage connections.
Quinbrook senior director Brian Restall said the site had been secured after obtaining Foreign Investment Review Board and local planning permissions from Moreton Bay Regional Council.
“Supernode is a particularly satisfying project for me as the Moreton Bay region is my birthplace and it is exciting to be delivering a ‘game changer’ opportunity for Queensland,” Restall said.
“Adding large scale battery storage and renewables to address high power prices, grid stress and the decarbonisation of our power supply at the same time is a remarkable investment opportunity by any measure.”
The project is Quinbrook’s first data centre-cum-storage venture in Australia after investing upwards of $12 billion in energy infrastructure assets since the early 1990s, mostly in the UK and US.
Quinbrook, which manages capital for pension funds and institutions, has deployed more than $2 billion of equity, predominantly in the UK and US, into low-carbon infrastructure and renewables in the past 12 to 18 months alone.
Its Australian interests include biomass plants in northern NSW, the Energy Locals retail business, community energy network business Energy Trade and the proposed Lockyer Energy gas power and storage project in Queensland.
Scaysbrook said there was also a huge opportunity to open up industrial decarbonisation through projects such as green steel, green aluminium and green fuels, for example, as well as longer-term green exports.
Quinbrook managing partner David Scaysbrook said the facility was part of a broader vision to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower, where the scale of investment required would overtake that in the domestic power sector.
He said it was part of the vision to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower, where the scale of investment required would overtake that in the domestic power sector.
“With Supernode, we will help attract new digital industries to come and flourish here and prosper sustainably by using locally produced, low-cost, carbon-free renewable power and excellent data connectivity,” Scaysbrook said.
“This is the critical communications infrastructure needed by progressive industry in this state and it represents a competitive advantage in achieving net zero operations at low cost that may become the envy of competing economies the world over.”
Quinbrook has begun marketing of Supernode to prospective data centre operators and has lodged applications to enable construction to start in mid-2023 on the battery-storage infrastructure.
The innovative concept mirrors a similar investment Quinbrook is making at Temple, near Austin, Texas, where a 800mW green data centre campus is due to come online next month.
