The $75 billion Rest superannuation fund has committed to invest $1 billion in renewable and clean energy projects in a program to be managed by Gold Coast-based global firm Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners.
Under the program, Rest will invest across a range of assets including solar energy and battery projects as well as green data storage centres. These centres will include Quinbrook’s $2.5 billion-plus Supernode centre which is being developed in Brendale, 30 kilometres from the centre of Brisbane.
Chief investment officer Andrew Lill said the commitment was the latest step in a journey to decarbonise Rest’s entire fund.
“In a world increasingly reliant on data, and through the global growth in cloud-based technologies and AI, data centres have become big business and demand for this critical infrastructure is expected to accelerate,” Lill said. “Repositories for the storage, management and dissemination of data require significant investments and huge amounts of energy. Maximising their energy efficiency and minimising their environmental impact through our commitment to Quinbrook is just one way we believe we can contribute to strong long-term financial benefits for Rest members while supporting our objective to achieve a net zero carbon footprint for the fund by 2050.
“Our investment in Quinbrook aims to provide strong long-term financial returns through greater exposure to next-generation infrastructure in Australia and beyond. Climate change mitigation, the energy transition and the road to net zero are creating some great investment opportunities.”
Lill said longer-term investments were particularly attractive to Rest as its membership of more than 1.96 million included more than a million members aged up to 30 who will not reach retirement age until after 2050.
Quinbrook’s Supernode project is being developed in stages on a 30-hectare site and is planned to host up to four hyperscale data centres and one of the largest battery storage installations in the Australian national electricity market.
It is planned that under normal circumstances the Supernode data centres will be powered by renewable energy and battery storage but the project is adjacent to the South Pine substation at Brendale, the central node of the Queensland electricity network, which has capacity to supply 8000 megawatts of power via three separate high voltage connections.
The site is intersected by the recently completed Torus optical dark fibre communicatons cable which links Brisbane to the US territory of Guam.
Quinbrook has already developed a similar 800-megawatt green data centre campus in Texas.
Image: A rendering of how the Brendale data centres project will eventually look.