Renewable energy, data centres and energy-intensive industries could shift economic growth towards regional Australia, where power can be generated and used closer to source.

Australia has been a nation of cities pullulating on our shores, but the new industries emerging to combat climate change are in the country. And industries that need that power may have to move to the country.

At present we are witnessing just the inklings of the changes that are opening up many new opportunities for work in the regions and the attendant expansion of regional economies.

Wind power and utility solar power require big spaces on rangelands and wind and sun conditions not likely to be found or afforded near cities. They require extensive, not intensive solutions, and they are creating their own secondary industries.

If you go to Hay, on the central plains of New South Wales, the streets have a renewed purpose about them.

Hay lies in a declared renewable energy zone, and has been sweet-talked by various renewable energy companies in recent years. They have offices in the main street, hoardings around town, and staff willing to take the locals through the process of establishing a new power industry.

Hay, or Burra in South Australia, are places where renewable energy companies learned that by engaging with the local community they were much less likely to run into entrenched opposition to their plans. And some of those plans can be on a massive scale.

In Burra’s large old town hall complex there are displays showing how the latest generation of enormous wind turbines are placed to minimise disturbances of sight or sound. Aside from enriching some local graziers, the town has been promised large community payments from wind generators through its council as well.

Communities such as these, usually in steady declines of population and prosperity, could see the kinds of benefits that would accrue from big utility projects in their bare, wide rangelands.

A previous scourge of carpetbaggers signing up individual farmers in inappropriate areas on existing transmission line pathways have caused immense damage to the renewables cause.

Utility wind and solar companies prepared to get involved with their communities and commit to a range of benefits and giving locals more say in where the utility projects were located are reaping the rewards of much improved outcomes.

There are farmers making big non-farm incomes from utility wind and solar, so the sense of resentment in a community can grow fast if they see themselves excluded. But when they are offered community engagement with the schemes the benefits begin to far outweigh even their hopes.

You can witness the prosperity ripping through the towns in terms of enriched town councils, civic development, commercial and property demand and, I think, a growing sense of civic pride.

Burra’s attempt to gain World Heritage listing for its history of copper mining preserved in intact copper mines and smelters dating to the 1840s, is being boosted by its renewed sense of prosperity.

But there is a much bigger reward awaiting some of these towns.

Firmed renewable energy is already understood to be the cheapest form of new energy available, far outperforming new coal, nuclear power or combined cycle gas turbine generators in both costs and speed of construction.

But when firmed renewable energy is co-located with power users it becomes far cheaper again. A lot of the price built into renewable energy is the cost and difficulty of transmitting power to far away cities. This has been a major stumbling block in Australia’s transition to renewables.

Negotiation rights for transmission lines across privately held land has turned out to be a nightmare and the main cause of a slowdown in renewables projects in Australia’s hinterland.

When data centres suddenly became the main game in new electrical power (and water) use worldwide, the developers tried to tap them into city power supplies.

That has been met with outright rejection right across the globe.

It is slowly dawning that data centres will have to seek new sources of firmed power supplies and that they will look for areas where they can be co-located with firmed power generators.

Aside from being cheaper, there is simply no other form of power generation that can be delivered in the timelines being demanded by the new trillion-dollar AI corporates in a desperate rush to build capacity.

The one great advantage of data centres is that their location is not very important compared with their access to the big bandwidths for information processing.

Australia, being a stable sovereign power with lots of access to bandwidth and wide rangelands rich in wind in solar resources, is ideal for development of data centres backed by firm renewables.

When they establish themselves in regional areas they will be seeking employees prepared to move to big country towns, so the knock-on effects are obvious.

Data centres are not the only new power consumer that suits this situation.

Mining industries are already co-locating renewable power generators with their projects in the Pilbara. The possibility of downstream processing of metal ores with renewable electrical power is already live for Rio’s Gladstone aluminium smelter in Queensland and has been planned for iron and steel processing at Whyalla’s steel mills.

Developments such as these tend to create their own opportunities in a constant cycle of reinforcement, suggesting the scaling up of rural economies will be a very long trend.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.