Australian renewables and digital infrastructure developer Energy North has submitted Project Ares, a proposed 1GW hyperscale data centre campus with a co-located 16GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) and approximately 3,000MWp of solar PV generation, to Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.
The project is located at Murranji Station in the Barkly Region of the Northern Territory (NT), approximately 683km south of Darwin.
The data centre campus would deliver 1GW of total information technology (IT) capacity in two phases, with Phase 1 targeting approximately 500MW. The entire facility will operate off-grid, drawing no power from the NT electricity network, and is designed to meet Tier III availability standards, a specification that requires guaranteed firm power and a fully independent backup generation source.
The power architecture supporting the campus features three components. A solar PV array using bifacial single-axis tracking modules will be built to approximately 3,000MWp across 6,000 to 7,000 hectares at full build-out.
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A co-located BESS will also scale to approximately 16GWh in capacity, with an undisclosed power output.
Gas-fired generation of approximately 1,038MW will provide firm power and backup capacity, with the gas infrastructure designed to be hydrogen-ready, indicating an intention to transition away from fossil fuel backup as green hydrogen becomes commercially viable.
The referral describes the overall power architecture as designed to transition to renewable-powered operations over time, consistent with the Australian government’s National Data Centre Expectations published in March 2026, which require new data centres to invest in new renewable energy generation concurrently with construction.
The project area covers approximately 186,000 hectares within Murranji Station, which is held under a perpetual pastoral lease.
The Preliminary Disturbance Envelope is approximately 19,150 hectares, a conservative maximum footprint that will be refined through front-end engineering and design, targeted surveys and Traditional Owner engagement. The data centre campus itself would occupy approximately 90 hectares at full build-out.
The site will require groundwater extraction from the Montejinni Limestone Aquifer in the Wiso Basin, with steady-state operational demand conservatively estimated at approximately 4 gigalitres per year.
Supporting infrastructure includes an internal road network of approximately 65-70km, a rail siding connecting to the Tarcoola to Darwin Railway, a 2,000m sealed airstrip, a workforce accommodation village for a peak construction workforce of up to 4,300 personnel, and fibre-optic telecommunications infrastructure within the project area.
Energy North is also developing a separate green ammonia production and export project, Project Sol, at the same station, though the two projects are described as independent and viable in their own right.
The scale of the battery storage component
The scale of the proposed BESS reflects the power quality requirements of an AI-optimised hyperscale data centre.
As Wärtsilä has argued in analysis published on Energy-Storage.news, AI data centres need battery storage to smooth demand fluctuations that would otherwise create grid instability, with the rapid and unpredictable power draw of large GPU clusters requiring fast-response storage that diesel generators cannot provide.
Project Ares resolves this problem by removing the data centre from the grid entirely, making the BESS the primary mechanism for maintaining power continuity between solar generation and data centre load.
The off-grid, solar-plus-storage-plus-gas architecture of Project Ares also represents a different approach to the data centre energy problem than the grid-connected model that has dominated investment decisions in New South Wales and Victoria.
In those states, the debate has centred on how to ensure data centres bring new generation rather than drawing on existing grid capacity.
Indeed, Fluence recently discussed how Australia’s data centre boom can be turned into a grid growth story if projects are structured to add net new renewable energy generation.
However, the grid connection queue in primary data centre hubs now exceeds four years in some locations, creating a commercial incentive to explore off-grid alternatives.
The regulatory context for data centre energy consumption is also evolving rapidly. Fire and Rescue NSW published a position statement mandating 240-minute fire-rated construction for lithium-ion battery rooms in data centres, citing the unknown fire behaviour of battery systems installed within enclosed compartments as a material risk factor.
Project Ares, as an off-grid facility in a remote pastoral setting, would face a different regulatory environment than urban New South Wales data centres, but the fire safety engineering requirements for a 16GWh battery storage system operating in an isolated location without access to urban fire services are likely to be a key consideration in the environmental impact statement.
Our publisher, Solar Media (part of Informa Group), will host the Battery Asset Management Summit Australia 2026 on 25-26 August at Amora Hotel Jamison in Sydney. You can find out more about the Summit on the official website.
