As the proponents of the proposed 1.5GW Marinus Link between Tasmania and the Australian mainland embark on major engineering works, a high profile campaign against the undersea cable is also ramping up, slamming the project as a “white elephant.”
In a submission to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest Integrated System Plan, the Bob Brown Foundation – an environmental group named after the co-founder and former leader of the Australian Greens – said the ISP was “fundamentally flawed” in its assessment of the proposed interconnector.
In a detailed nine-page submission, the foundation’s director Christine Milne – herself a former leader of the Australian Greens – describes the Marinus Link as an “outdated, risk prone model” where mainland renewable generators depended on storage services across the Bass Strait.
This concept of Tasmania serving as the “Battery of the Nation” has been promoted by the Liberal state government and its utilities as a “state-building” project, and backed by the Morrison government as part of its JobMaker plan.
It will involve at least two new sub-sea links to Victoria, new pumped hydro facilities and additional wind farms and transmissions lines. It is the basis for the Tasmania government’s target of “200 per cent renewables” by 2040.
But the idea has its critics. Analysis published late last year by the Victoria Energy Policy Centre and authored by energy market expert Dr Bruce Mountain, argues it would be cheaper and less risky to build big batteries on the mainland, than to pipe power back and forth over the Bass Strait.
In the report, which was commissioned by the Bob Brown Foundation, Mountain compared the cost of building a 1,500MW big battery with up to four hours of storage capacity against the Marinus Link proposal, finding that the battery could provide the backup supply of power at more than 20 per cent cheaper.
Reliability is also an issue, brought to the fore just this month with the news that government-owned utility Hydro Tasmania has terminated its contract with the operators of the existing interconnector, Basslink, following a lengthy legal battle over extended outages that left the island state high and dry in 2015.
“Basslink has never made profit and has proved to be unreliable and has incurred millions of dollars in damages and liability,” Milne writes in the BBF submission this week.
“The risks associated with reliability of undersea cables are considerable. How has this been accounted for in Marinus Link risk assessment?
“Why would other NEM participants submit themselves to this level of risk? Why wouldn’t Victoria insulate itself from this risk by becoming self sufficient in generation and storage?
“How is this reflected in the ISP2022? It is not unlike the old centralised power station and single transmission line to market model that has been replaced by distributed, localised systems of generation and storage.”
Milne also argues that the interconnector should be recognised and assessed as an integrated project, that includes 1.9GW of new wind projects and associated infrastructure in Tasmania, including the massive Robbins Island wind farm that Bob Brown, himself, has publicly denounced.
Robbins Island has come up against considerable local opposition in Tasmania – and not just for the potential impacts of the turbines. As RenewEconomy has reported, associated transmission infrastructure needed to support both the wind farm and Marinus is also causing considerable angst.
“Marinus Link is not economically viable and will be of no net benefit to the NEM,” Milne says in the submission, dated February 14.
“Perversely far from creating an optimal pathway, AEMO’s ISP and proposed actionable transmission Marinus Link project will hold back development of the NEM.”
“This is because social license will be withdrawn from renewable energy projects and transmission infrastructure around Australia because of this failure,” Milne writes.
“Communities will not tolerate AEMO’s ignoring Biodiversity and overriding of planning principles in its ISP and recommended Renewable Energy Zones.”
The developers behind Marinus, meanwhile, have this week embarked on an underwater engineering survey of Bass Strait to determine the most suitable corridor for laying the project’s undersea cables.
As Marinus Link CEO Bess Clark noted in a statement on the news, the interconnector has passed a Regulatory Investment Test for Transmission (RIT-T) overseen by the independent Australian Energy Regulator (AER), as well as being included in AEMO’s ISP.
“Marinus Link is key to Australia’s clean energy future – increasing reliability, placing downward pressure on electricity prices and cutting emissions by making the most of our high quality renewable energy resources,” Clark said on Tuesday.
