Just when most Tasmanians thought the Basslink saga was as dead and buried as the underwater cable itself, a new twist has emerged.
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On Monday, the results of an independent investigation into the cable’s failure last year – which almost left our drought-hit state high and dry – came back, and the result wasn’t good. In fact, it wasn’t anything – not that anyone could determine anyway. The report returned a “cause unknown” result, which left pretty much everyone involved scratching their collective heads.
International cable experts Cable Consulting International said that the outage was a “force majeure” event, with no discernible cause revealed.
Make no mistake, the power saga that gripped the state over summer was serious. Our power generation dams were run almost dry and our dependence on the Basslink cable was obvious. So when it unexpectedly stopped working, it left Tasmania vulnerable like never before.
That downturn in our ability to draw power from the mainland was exacerbated by the fact Basslink the company wasn’t able to first identify the issue, then secondly locate the fault in the cable itself. The issue became even more problematic when the cable again went down less than two weeks after the initial fault was fixed.
All that forced the state government to restart the Tamar Valley Power Station at a considerable cost to the taxpayer – a situation no one would like to see repeated.
The company that owns Basslink is now calling on the state-owned energy company to resume making payments on the cable after Monday’s ruling that the interconnector failure was “unavoidable”.
Energy Minister Matt Groom, however, was in no mood for conciliation. He hit back, saying he did not accept the Basslink position, while the Hydro itself was only talking up “a good faith payment” so that discussions on the resumption of the fee could continue.
Whatever happens, Tasmania’s government and the Hydro must do everything they can to make sure we’re never in this position again. Greens energy spokesperson Rosalie Woodruff summed up the sentiments quite accurately when she said Tasmania shouldn’t rely on Basslink to “keep the lights on”.
We need a plan that expands on our already impressive renewable energy portfolio – with a focus on more wind energy capacity the obvious answer.