Image by AngMoKio
By Jo Nova
The Daily Telegraph has discovered a major Net Zero project has signed up several Chinese companies. The huge battery and solar scheme in Bundey South Australia has been given the red carpet treatment by the Albanese government. It will be fast tracked as a priority by the government and cash will rain down from the “Capital Investment Scheme (CIS)” .
The group running the project is Ganaspi Energy. Supposedly it is based in Sydney, except that when the Daily Telegraph visited the office there, it was empty. No one was responding to emails or text messages, and the phone number didn’t connect. If this company was a ghost corporation, or a front for Chinese interests, they don’t seem to be trying hard to disguise it?
Ganaspi Energy has brought in several Chinese firms, and held a party with some them in Suzhou to celebrate. Supposedly, the Bundey BESS and Solar project will be the largest battery storage power station in the Southern Hemisphere.
Taxpayers are underwriting the project for the first 15 years.
Revealed: Net Zero project’s major links to Chinese business
By James Willis, The Daily Telegraph
Two of the suppliers are the China Energy Engineering Corporation, and CEEC Energy Storage Technology, both of which are owned by the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, the CEEC is listed as a stakeholder of the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative).
The danger with battery projects is that unlike coal or gas plants, they are digitally connected, full of sensors, and often linked by remote management systems. If a state-owned Chinese firm or its subsidiaries help design or integrate these systems, Beijing potentially gains a lot of real time data:
- Telemetry data (power flows, grid vulnerabilities, frequency control info).
- Firmware access (e.g., backdoors in battery-management systems).
- A future sabotage vector, should relations deteriorate.
Access like this to the national grid not only gives China oversight over our energy flows, it gives it a foot in the door, and a precedent to bring in other Chinese projects. How can we object when there is already a large piece of critical infrastructure approved. If and when the Australian government ever wanted to criticize the CCP, it would only take a small nudge from a friend of the CCP to silence the PM. Nice grid you have there…
We know China wants to bring Australia into the Belt and Road program. In 2021 Dan Andrews tried to sign up Victoria to the Belt and Road program but it was rejected by the Coalition government as “inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy…”
This is a win for China on so many levels
Keeping the renewable dream alive in Australia is good for China. It helps sabotage our reliable coal power. A few more Australian factories will close and move to Shanghai. We’ll buy even more Chinese made windmills, more EVs, battery packs and solar panels. It embeds Chinese standards in electronics and battery control software, a form of “technological colonisation” that increases the odds and advantages of future Chinese projects.
Indeed, we can almost imagine a Chinese representative siding up to Anthony Albanese in his darkest Net Zero days, and generously offering to help rescue him from the mess it has become. Who knows? Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen might have been very amenable to offers of rapid big batteries, with the guarantee it will profit from taxpayer schemes, as long as they look the other way on the foreign investment risk.
When asked, Mr Bowen told The Daily Telegraph that “Labor was delivering “the maximum value to the taxpayer.” But all the details are hidden from the public because they are ‘commercial in confidence’. It could just as easily mean the Albanese government sold our national security for a sweet deal to rescue their own reputations. How would we know this wasn’t the case?
The Opposition has fittingly demanded there be an inquiry into the $2.6 billion dollar project. However government sources told the Daily Telegraph that Ganaspi is an Australian owned company and usually the sub-contracting arrangements of Australian companies don’t trigger investigations under the foreign investment framework.
A $2.6 billion dollar foot in the door…