Australia’s biggest smelter to launch massive wind and solar tender, says nuclear too costly

A massive tender for wind and solar projects is to be launched next week to help repower Australia’s biggest aluminium smelter Tomago, near Newcastle, with its majority owner saying nuclear is out of the question because it is too slow and too expensive.

The tender will be a landmark event for the Australian renewable energy transition, because the Tomalgo smelter – with annual demand of more than 8 terawatt hours, is the biggest single energy consumer in the country.

Majority owner Rio Tinto this year has already announced two record-breaking contracts for wind and solar farms in Australia to provide power for its Boyne Island smelter in Gladstone, Queensland, and its two alumina refineries in the same port city.

Those contracts included one for the first gigawatt scale solar project in Australia, the 1.1 GW Upper Calliope solar project in central Queensland, and the 1.4 GW Bungapan wind project to be developed by iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest’s majority owned Windlab.

In an interview on Renew Economy’s popular and weekly Energy Insiders podcast this week, the head of Pacific Repowering in Rio Tinto’s energy and climate division, Vik Selvaraja, says the first steps towards a new tender will be launched next week.

“Next week, we’re launching an RFP (request for proposals) for Tomago,” Selvaraja told the podcast.

“And we are very, very keen to go down a very similar process of assessing what projects exist in New South Wales that we can partner with to bring to the market.”

Further details were not released, but it is likely to be similar in scope to the 5 GW of new capacity required by Rio Tinto for its Gladstone smelters and refineries.

Rio Tinto has locked in more than 2.2 GW of that wind and solar capacity, and is in talks with state and federal governments about assistance for the more costly storage and other dispatchable capacity before embarking on the rest of the tenders.

Tomago has a need for nearly one gigawatt of flat load to power its pot lines and – like the Gladstone facilities – wants to switch from its current dependence on coal to renewables and flexible power by the end of the decade.

The switch from fossil fuels to renewables for the country’s biggest consumers of energy makes a nonsense of the claims that such facilities can only prosper on so-called “base-load” power, a claim the federal Coalition uses to justify its plans to extend the life of coal fired generators and replace them with nuclear.

Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien has been claiming that while nuclear is expensive to build, it is somehow cheap to consume. But that too is a nonsense claim, and only made possible in some countries by government ownership and massive subsidies.

Asked about the nuclear option, Selvaraja said: “As far as we can see … all validated and independent data that exists on costs say that it (nuclear) is a very expensive source of energy. And I think in Australia, certainly, we’ve got low cost wind and solar, and we were going to run with that.”

Rio Tinto, it should be noted, was once one of the major producers of uranium, but no more following the closure of the Ranger mine in the NT, owned by Energy Resources of Australia.

You can listen to the full interview with Selvaraja here, along with our weekly commentary of all things energy. You can find past episodes of the Energy Insiders and other RenewEconomy podcasts here.