Here in Tasmania, we’re used to being the whipping boys for the green follies of Mainland activists. There’s a steady stream of FIFO activists in and out of the state, ever-ready to chain themselves to anything that threatens to make a profit. Mainlanders love to keep Tasmania locked up as a gigantic national park-cum-holiday resort. At the same time, they flood the coastal towns with Boomer retirees, overburdening our health system and driving house prices through the roof. And then they complain that we’re a “mendicant state”.
In 2015, the consequences of green policy plunged Tasmania into an environmental and energy crisis. Under the Gillard government’s carbon tax regime, the corporatised hydro-electric authority was handed a perverse incentive to grab a massive carbon credit windfall profit by selling “green” hydro power to mainland energy retailers. Generating hydro power beyond Tasmania’s local demand meant that dam levels were drastically lowered.
It was a gamble that went badly wrong when the following summers were unusually dry — and the BassLink power cable broke down, as it occasionally will. That meant that the hydro generators had to keep using draining dams to supply the state’s power needs, with no chance of buying backup supply from the Mainland.
Tasmania came perilously close to running out of both water and power.
So, forgive me for being antsy about the latest Mainland proposal to use Tasmania to push their loony climate agenda.
The renewables-rich island state of Tasmania has big plans to become a green battery for the mainland, however, the project is set to cost billions and not everyone’s convinced that the economics stack up.
Nor do the physics.
Or the politics. The Greens are adamantly opposed to dams. Stopping a proposed hydro project in Tasmania was the genesis of the Greens party. They also want to dismantle the Lake Pedder dam, Tasmania’s second-largest. Green activists like the Wentworth Group are also implacably opposed to new dams on the Mainland.
So, green activists are effectively proposing to exploit a resource that they detest almost as much as fossil fuels.
What they are proposing is a radically different type of hydro power.
Normal hydropower is created by storing water on high ground and running it downhill to spin a turbine at the bottom.
Pumped hydro operates on the same principle, except that two dams, one higher than the other, work in a cycle that pumps water into the upper reservoir during off-peak hours.
Potential energy is then stored and generated when it’s needed — virtually a big, green battery.
If that sounds complicated and expensive, it is. Snowy 2.0 was originally budgeted at around $4bn — like all government projects, it’s already blown out to $5bn and counting, with long delays added.
All of this is because politicians and rent-seeking energy corporations are determined to inflict intermittent, unreliable and staggeringly expensive wind and solar power onto the national grid.
No surprise that it’s a massively expensive boondoggle.
The estimated cost has already gone up. It could end up costing a combined $10 billion, including $2.25 billion for Battery of the Nation and $3.5 billion for Marinus Link. That price does not include wind development either […]
Bruce Mountain from the Victoria Energy Policy Centre […] said AEMO had not included the cost of building the wind generation needed to make the Battery of the Nation project and Marinus Link worthwhile. This, he said, could add another $5 billion to the total cost of Battery of the Nation.
ABC Australia
As Mountain also points out: “It would not be in the public interest or, indeed, as far as I can see, Tasmania’s interest, to be going ahead with it.”
The delusions of Mainland green loons not in Tasmania’s interest? Tell us something we didn’t know already.