From CFACT

By Joanne Nova

Australia is supposed to be going hell for leather to install renewables in order to pretend it has a chance of making Labor’s 82% reduction in emissions target by 2030. Instead investors are running away:

Investors desert Australia’s renewable rollout at ‘critical juncture’

Mike Foley and Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald

Investment in renewable projects collapsed by 50 per cent over the past year, wiping out $4 billion in spending on the rollout, compromising the Albanese government’s clean energy targets and spurring industry warnings that the delays could raise electricity bills.

It’s always a critical juncture for renewables isn’t it? It’s like that for things that serve no useful purpose and levitate on subsidies. Investors must bet on which way the political wind will blow, and last year, after the Trump win, renewable energy took a hit.

Financial commitments for new renewable generation projects fell to a 10-year low in 2025 of $4.4 billion, half the value of projects that reached financial close in 2024, according to the Clean Energy Council’s annual report, published on Tuesday.

Investors are fleeing because of all the usual reasons not to invest — there’s a glut of solar power at noon that curtails every kind of generator and makes prices so low they go negative. Manufacturing and transportation costs are lifting off. Added to that, all the new areas for wind and solar plants have no transmission lines built to them yet, and the farmers hate the proposed high voltage lines. Community resistance is organized and growing. Around the world skeptical governments are winning elections and the golden subsidy deals might vanish any day now.

Cue the next crazy plan where our Energy Minister thinks data centers will rescue his ludicrous target:

Energy Minister banks on data-centre boom to prop up flagging investment in renewables

By Perry Williams and Elizabeth Pike, The Australian

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has bet that Australia’s booming data-centre industry can reverse the slower-than-expected rollout of wind farms amid fears a slump in ­financing projects will result in Labor failing to hit its 2030 renewables target.

Data centres could help wind farm projects get off the ground as part of a proposed edict for operators to underwrite new renewable power supply and pay their full share of new grid connectivity, so costs are not passed on to consumers or businesses.

As if AI data centres would want to jump through all those Australian hoops and regressive taxes to make it happen here, when they can set up in the US where electricity is half the price?

The kind of dumb datacenters that serve up Netflix need to be near their customers because the lag times matter, but AI datacenters don’t because no one cares if their answer comes 500 milliseconds later. Australia could have been a master hub of AI development for the world if we wanted to burn our coal, gas, or uranium, instead, we pray to the Eco-Lords to attract datacentres for gaming or watching reruns of the Hunger Games so they might install a few more industrial wind parks, kill off some excess koalas, and cool us by zero degrees by 2100.

This article originally appeared at JoNova