Plans to install a nearly 350 km undersea cable connecting the electricity grids of Tasmania and Victoria have cleared another key milestone and marked a significant Australian first, after the huge project was this week awarded its offshore transmission licence.
Marinus Link revealed on Friday it has been granted the very first Transmission and Infrastructure Licence (TIL) under Australia’s Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Act 2021, legislation introduced and ushered through federal parliament Angus Taylor, the current leader of the opposition.
As well as being the first TIL granted under the national regime designed primarily to support the development of an offshore wind industry in Australia, the granting of the transmission licence also marks the final Commonwealth approval leading to construction of the controversial sub-sea cable.
“The Transmission and Infrastructure licence is one of the final permits ahead of construction, allowing electricity to be transmitted through Commonwealth waters and providing protection over the subsea cable route,” MLPL CEO Stephanie McGregor said in a statement on Friday.
“We’ve worked collaboratively with the registrar in supporting the new framework, and we’re proud to have helped pave the way for the emerging offshore electricity sector.”
Since being proposed by the Coalition Turnbull government in 2017, Marinus Link has had a long road to this point, with a flurry of milestones over the past year securing state and federal approvals and sign-off on financial terms by the project’s three owners, the Tasmania, Victoria and federal governments.
But over that time the huge project has also blown out in cost – from two, 750 megawatt (MW) cables priced at $1.3 billion to a first-stage 750 MW cable priced at more than $3.5 billion – and has attracted its fair share of controversy and criticism.
Much of the most vocal opposition to the project has played out on the Tasmanian side of the project, where environmental groups like the Bob Brown Foundation have described it as an “ecological and economic disaster” for the Island State.
Critics argue that the project will raise electricity costs for Tasmanian consumers while also paving the way for major new renewable energy and grid infrastructure projects that threaten the local environment and ecosystems while benefitting – they say – mostly the mainland.
One of the most contested parts of Marinus Link, the $1.3 billion onshore transmission upgrade needed to connect it to the Tasmanian grid, reached final investment decision in May, after the Clean Energy Finance Corporation committed $1.2 billion in finance from the Rewiring the Nation Fund.
The first stage of the North West Transmission Development (NWTD) also had been subject to an appeal lodged with the state’s planning tribunal, but that was dismissed in August. A Supreme Court challenge of the TasCAT decision has not been ruled out.
Meanwhile, contractors have been forging ahead with various early works at either side of the interconnector, mostly in Victoria, where the onshore part of the cable will travel 90 km from the coastal town of Sandy Point to Hazelwood in the Latrobe Valley.
McGregor says MLPL will now progress its design notification and develop a management plan setting out how activities will be safely and responsibly managed from construction and operation through to maintenance, repair and eventual decommissioning.
“As part of developing our management plan, we will undertake an engagement process, including with First Peoples, marine users, relevant government agencies and coastal communities,” she said on Friday.
The federal Labor government says Marinus Link will strengthen the reliability of Australia’s main grid, while also providing long-term certainty to major industrial users in Tasmania, tapping the mainland’s cheap and abundant solar during the day and powering homes with Tasmanian hydro power at night.
“Being connected is good,” said federal assistant minister for energy, Josh Wilson, speaking as a resident of Western Australia, which hosts Australia’s biggest isolated grid “that isn’t connected and doesn’t really have a prospect of being connected.”
“It will mean that Tasmania can have access to cheaper renewables that are present in the national energy market on the mainland side, and it will mean that the mainland can benefit from the deep storage that is derived from Tasmania’s status as the hydropower king,” he told Tasmanian radio on Friday morning.
“Both of those things are good. That flexibility and interconnectedness is good, and the project will have a range of broader economic and employment benefits as well.”
To this end, the governments say that together with the North West Transmission Developments project, Marinus will create around 2,400 jobs and $2.4 billion of investment.
“The project will support hundreds of local jobs during construction and create long-term economic opportunities by attracting investment in renewable energy and related industries,” said Labor’s member for Braddon, in Tasmania, Anne Urquhart.
“Importantly, the Tasmanian Clean Energy Centre of Excellence will help ensure local people can access the skills and training needed to take advantage of these opportunities.
“Through apprenticeships, traineeships and specialised training pathways, young Tasmanians will be able to build rewarding careers in the clean energy sector without having to leave the region,” Urquhart said.
MLPL’s McGregor says that the company has worked hard to make the benefits of the huge project “tangible” to communities on either side of the Bass Strait.
“We had 1,000 businesses from Tasmania and Victoria attend our procurement days last year,” she told a recent energy security forum hosted by the Committee for Economic Development Australia (CEDA) in Melbourne.
“We’ve now contracted through our construction delivery partners 12 companies in Gippsland, 16 companies in Tasmania. So organisations who employ locally are part of the local fabric. So having that real sense of tangible impact and benefit beyond what is just about consumer benefits is quite important.”
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