Professor Barry McMullin:

I thank the Deputy. I empathise with the concerns of her constituents in those situations. I would not want to downplay or underplay the significant consequences that unreliable electricity supply would have. We do not want to go there. My concern is that if we do not restrict the expansion in our electricity demand, at least until we have a much clearer picture of how things are evolving in meeting our emissions goals, then to avoid those brownouts and blackouts we will wind up building more additional fossil fuel generation capacity and running it. If we build it, it will run. It will not run for zero times. I know people say it will only run very little but there will be more emissions than there would have been had those data centres not been built and built corresponding fossil fuel infrastructure to be able to meet peak demand. The emissions would definitely be higher in that situation. With regard to a moratorium, or at least a temporary moratorium, until we have a clear pathway whereby we can confidently believe will reduce overall emissions fast enough expanding data centres is a bad idea.