“Get out of the way:” Manufacturer wants more renewables to soften price crunch and avoid shutdowns

An Australian manufacturer has called on governments to “get out of the way” and allow developers to build more renewable energy projects after it was forced to shut its operation due to threatened outages caused by the failure of multiple fossil fuel power stations this week.

Metropolitan Sydney, the Hunter and Illawarra regions roasted through a heatwave on Wednesday, making for the hottest November day in four years, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Outages at four of 12 coal-fired power units, and another outage at a combined gas-fired power plant, forced the state government and the market operator to take action to reduce the risk of blackouts, including calling up emergency reserves and urging agencies and consumers to cut energy use.

Sell&Parker, runs a manufacturing operation in Smithfield building anchor cages that provide the foundation for wind turbines and the bolts to affix them, and also operates one of the biggest large scrap metal recycling facilities in the state at Blacktown.  The first employs 56 people, the second 116 people.

Simon Preston, head of Sell&Parker’s manufacturing division, says the company received a call at 9am on Wednesday ordering it to shut down its operations. When the company investigated why, Preston says they learned it was in response to the threat of power outages from the so called “always on” baseload coal and gas generators.

“We’re sitting here trying to manufacture more renewable energy components, but the old coal fire stations and a gas plant went down,” Preston said.

“Yesterday at 3pm, it was blowing about 18 knots across New South Wales and it was 36C because the sun was up. Any solar or wind farm that had already been built in NSW yesterday would have been generating electricity when these coal-fired power stations and gas generators failed.

“Really simply: if the renewable energy projects that should have been built by now had been built, we wouldn’t have been in this situation.”

Preston says the company was back up and running on Thursday morning, but had “lost 24 hours” and was now working out how to manage “all the jobs we are now late for.”

He added that this was not the first time the company had been forced to shut its operations in response to spikes in the price of power, but Preston rejected any suggestion that stopped a repeat of the situation required building new coal and gas fired power plants as he said the evidence of the last 24 hours showed they were “unreliable”.

“Last time I studied chemistry. gas was still made of a hydrogen carbon,” he said. “It’s also bloody expensive.”

Preston said a hold up of new renewable energy projects was to blame. In one example, he said Sell&Parker had quoted the proposed Coppabella Wind Farm 15 times in the last six years but the project remained stuck in a “holding pattern”.

“My main message is: streamline the process to get the projects up and running. Stop getting in the way and let us build it,” he said.

“And at the end of the day it’s their targets we’re trying to build and meet.”