Optus Base Station Cooling Project (Revoked)

Optus Base Station Cooling Project (Revoked) is an Industrial Electricity and Fuel Efficiency project that was distributed across Optus's mobile network infrastructure throughout New South Wales, Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria. It was registered in October 2015 by Shell Energy Trading Pty Ltd. Unlike traditional land-based carbon farming, this project lacks a single nearest major town, central coordinates, or specific regional land use, as its footprint consisted of a nationwide network of telecommunications sites rather than a defined parcel of land.

Industrial Electricity and Fuel Efficiency projects are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by lowering the amount of energy consumed by commercial and industrial operations. The standard requirements for this methodology dictate that proponents must modify, replace, or install new equipment to improve efficiency, and then accurately measure the resulting energy savings against a rigorously established historical baseline.

Because the project footprint spans across the entire Australian continent, it encompasses virtually every regional environmental condition. The applicable rainfall classifications range from the monsoonal tropics of the Northern Territory to the semi-arid outback and the high-rainfall temperate zones of Tasmania. Similarly, the project traverses all major soil types, from sandy loams to cracking clays and basalts. However, as an infrastructure-based initiative, the immediate physical environment for these activities was entirely confined to the built environment of enclosed equipment shelters.

This project was set up to implement improved control systems and processes to optimise the cooling of existing base station hardware. By running these cooling systems more efficiently, Optus sites could draw significantly less electricity from the grid while maintaining safe operating temperatures for their telecommunications equipment. Ultimately, this project was revoked under section 30 of the CFI Rule on July 3, 2018.