By Jo Nova
A second big Australian “Pumped Hydro” scheme is crashing on economic rocks…
The Marinus Link cable was meant to spark a glorious renewables boom and make Tasmania “The Battery of the Nation”, instead it will cost more than a new advanced coal fired plant, provide no energy at all, and currently even the thought of it is causing chaos. New projects are on hold, factories can’t expand and Tasmania is held hostage to visions of an electricity grid designed to stop storms instead of generate energy.
The Marinus Link is a 255km cable that was supposed to be the second interconnector from Tasmania to the mainland. In theory it would cost $3 billion and carry 1.5GW of electricity. But the costs have blown out to $5.5 billion and the State Premier is balking at the new bill.
However, most of the new wind power projects in the state are awaiting the magic cable before they commit — without it, they can’t reach the real market, which is mainland Australia. But without them, the local grid doesn’t have enough surplus capacity to cover the lean times (or rather, without the cable, they can’t get access to more reliable brown coal power in Victoria).
The brutal truth is that wind power is only “cheap” (or even barely economic) if the poor taxpayer serfs pay for the five thousand million dollar cable (and the storage). If Tasmania built another reliable power plant instead, it wouldn’t need the inter-connector at all. The cables look, smell and cost like public infrastructure, but are just another hidden cost of “renewables”.
The foiled plan and uncertainty means Tasmania is in a quiet energy crisis.
Even without being built, “the cable” is causing chaos
As reported in The Australian, Tasmanian businesses can’t get energy to expand. One paper mill that runs on coal-fired boilers wants to replace them with electricity but can’t. In a state with “100% renewable energy” you’d think the state electricity corporation would be beating a path to their door. Instead Hydro Tasmania said it can’t spare 50MW of despatchable power and told the company it needs to arrange equivalent power from wind and solar generators. But the paper mill is struggling, and says it would involve “substantially higher operating costs”. Funny how the free energy always costs more?
Industry, jobs on hold as Tasmania ‘runs out of power’ and Marinus Link stalls
Matthew Denholm, The Australian
Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Michael Bailey said the state was in “another energy crisis”.
We have businesses asking the government for more power to expand and create more jobs, yet today we’ve heard that the government is turning them away because we simply do not have enough generation to meet demand,” Mr Bailey said. “If that’s not the definition of a crisis, then what is? Even the Economic Regulator has said … there is no ‘head room’ in the Tasmanian grid, which confirms the business community’s worst fears.
In the glory days of 2018 as dreamed up by Malcolm Turnbull, the second cable was originally estimated to cost $1.1 billion, and the full 5GW “Battery” of pumped hydro in Tasmania would be twice the size of Snowy 2.0 (which is currently also stalled in its own cost blowout and trapped tunnel borer).
Some Greens want to Sink the Link too
Environmentally the idea is so bad even Bob Brown and Christine Milne, former Greens leaders, have launched a “Sink the Link” campaign to stop the cable for environmental reasons. They can see now that it will unleash a wave of industrial development that will consume the wilderness.
Are these older Greens finally realizing they were tools of property developers and big industry all along? They campaigned for years for exactly this future. Now they want to stop this train?
“No one in Tasmania’s south appreciates the sell-out and industrialisation of the north that is being proposed to line the pockets of private developers and feed power to the mainland. The magnificent Robbins Island, takayna, Stanley, and forests and farmlands from Circular Head to Eddystone Point and the Central Plateau are all in the firing line. It is time that people had access to information about what is happening on the ground,” Bob Brown Foundation takayna Campaigner Scott Jordan said.
–Bob Brown Foundation
This is the state that approved a Mega Wind farm that won’t be able to operate for five months of the year lest it hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. That’s the Robbins Island Mega wind farm: killing birds and baseload power at 300 kilometers per hour. Presumably construction of the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere is also waiting for the big cable…
See also The Tasmanian Times