What is the Mulwala Solar Farm?

The Mulwala Solar Farm is a 31MW utility-scale solar project in the Riverina district of New South Wales, about 2 kilometres north of the town of Mulwala. It is registered with the Australian Energy Market Operator and is expected to generate approximately 66 GWh annually. Construction began in the third quarter of 2025. The project is developed by European Energy Australia, which acquired the rights from Swedish developer OX2 in September 2024.

How does Mulwala fit Google’s Digital Future Initiative?

Mulwala is part of Google’s Digital Future Initiative, the A$1 billion Australian commitment Google made in November 2021. The Initiative funds Australian infrastructure, research and renewable energy investment. The Mulwala PPA supports Google’s 2030 goal of operating on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where it operates.

Mulwala Solar Farm nears grid connection: the Google and AirTrunk hyperscaler PPA explained

Q: How is the Google and AirTrunk PPA structured?

Google’s power purchase agreement was signed in December 2023 and contracts 25MW of Mulwala’s output. The deal is sleeved through AirTrunk. AirTrunk procures the electricity and the time-matched renewable energy certificates from European Energy Australia, then applies them against Google’s Australian load running in AirTrunk-hosted infrastructure. The structure ties one specific hyperscale tenant load to one specific new-build renewable project.

At a glance

Google, AirTrunk and European Energy Australia confirmed on Sunday 31 May 2026 that the Mulwala Solar Farm is nearing completion and preparing to join the National Electricity Market.
The project is registered with the Australian Energy Market Operator at 31MW. Google’s 2023 power purchase agreement contracts 25MW of the output.
The PPA is sleeved through AirTrunk: AirTrunk procures the electricity and time-matched renewable energy certificates and applies them against Google’s load in AirTrunk-hosted infrastructure.
Mulwala forms part of Google’s Digital Future Initiative, the A$1 billion Australian commitment Google made in November 2021.
Bikash Koley, Google’s vice president of Global Infrastructure and Capacity, delivers the 8:50am keynote at the Financial Review AI Summit on Tuesday 2 June 2026.

Mulwala solar farm

The Mulwala Solar Farm sits about 2 kilometres north of the town of Mulwala in the Riverina district of southern New South Wales. The project is registered in the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Market Management System at 31MW and is expected to generate around 66 GWh annually. Construction commenced in the third quarter of 2025. AEMO registration was completed in April 2026.

Google’s 25MW PPA is sleeved through AirTrunk. AirTrunk procures the electricity and the time-matched renewable energy certificates from European Energy Australia. Google takes the matched clean energy against its Australian load, which runs in AirTrunk-hosted infrastructure. The structure ties one new-build renewable project to one specific tenant load, contracted upfront before construction began. This is the model the federal data centre and AI infrastructure consultation has been steering the industry toward.

The project itself has changed hands during build. The original 2023 PPA was signed with OX2 Australia, the Swedish-owned developer. OX2 sold the Mulwala project rights to European Energy Australia in September 2024, alongside the larger Lancaster Solar Farm in Victoria. European Energy has carried Mulwala through to grid connection, with a co-located 20MW/40MWh battery energy storage system planned alongside.

What makes Mulwala additive

The standing critique of hyperscaler renewable energy claims is that they rest on certificate accounting rather than new build. The standing critique of solar-only PPAs is that the generation profile does not match the always-on data centre load. Mulwala is one of the better Australian responses to both arguments, and worth working through in those terms.

On additionality, the 2023 PPA was the financial close trigger for a project that did not previously exist. The Westpac and DZ Bank construction financing for European Energy’s Mulwala and Lancaster portfolio closed in June 2025, after the PPA was in place. Without the corporate offtake, the 31MW would not be entering the NEM in 2026.

On time-matching, the AirTrunk-procured certificates are time-stamped, not annualised. That is a step beyond the older Greenpower-style model. The co-located 20MW/40MWh battery storage system on the same site is the firming layer that closes more of the gap between daytime solar generation and 24/7 data centre load. Solar plus storage is the direction the global PPA market is moving, and Mulwala is being built to that pattern.

On scale, 25MW is small against Google’s Australian operational footprint, and Google has not represented it otherwise. It is one project under a multi-year initiative. The contractual template is what scales. Hyperscaler offtake, sleeved through a colocation host, sized to a specific tenant load, delivered through a new-build project with co-located storage. Operators, energy retailers and developers can replicate that structure across the A$155 billion Australian data centre pipeline cited in our AFR AI Summit 2026 preview.

Kmart Joy: where the AI demand is going

The AI workloads the new capacity is being matched against are showing up in Australian customer experiences this week. Kmart Australia announced on 28 May 2026 that it will launch Joy, a conversational AI shopping assistant, inside the Kmart app in June 2026. Joy runs on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, the agentic AI platform Google unveiled at NRF on 11 January 2026. It supports conversational search, photo-based recommendations, AR virtual try-on for clothing, and a “see it in my space” preview for furniture.

Joy is the Australian retail debut of Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Kmart sits inside Wesfarmers alongside Bunnings, Officeworks and Target. The launch month lines up with the keynote week, and the demand it represents is the same demand Mulwala’s electrons are being matched to. Joy widens the Gemini Enterprise customer set in Australia alongside the CBA fraud agent and ANZ Agentforce 360 rollouts we covered in the AFR AI Summit 2026 preview.