The Northern Territory’s CLP government has confirmed plans to extend the life of a nearly 40-year old gas plant as it struggles to ramp up the renewable energy share on its main grid – and to meet its 2030 target of 50 per cent renewables.
Reports emerged on Monday that NT minister for essential services, Steven Edgington, had confirmed that the government-owned producer Territory Generation will keep three of the four gas generators at Darwin’s Channel Island Power Station open past their planned retirement date of 2030.
A spokesperson for minister Edgington told ABC News this would include extending the life of one of the generators to 2031 and two others to 2035,” a spokesperson for Mr Edgington said. A fourth generator at the station is being converted into a synchronous condenser.
Renew Economy has sought confirmation from the minister’s office, as well as comment from NT energy minister Gerard Maley and from Territory Generation.
The Channel Island Power Station has been the primary source of electricity for the Darwin-Katherine Interconnected System (DKIS) since it came into operation in 1987, and is the largest bit of generation kit owner by Territory Generation.
But as it nears its retirement age, it is becoming increasingly unreliable. According to the latest Power System Performance Review by the NT Utilities Commission, a significant outage in February 2024 due to a gas supply issue at the Channel Island plant impacted contributed to an increase in customer minutes without supply reported for 2023-24. A more serious gas supply-related event in 2020-21 also resulted in an outage at the plant.
“With the aging infrastructure at key power stations, particularly Channel Island, investments in new or existing generation assets remain critical for sustaining long-term reliability, noting any action should be informed by a robust cost-benefit analysis,” the report says.
The Northern Territory has so far had a difficult path to renewables, both due to successive governments’ attachment to the territory’s gas industry and due to the nature of its electricity networks, which are small and bound by strict rules about forecasting and dispatch.
A biennial review into the the Darwin-Katherine Electricity System Plan (DKESP) – a plan first put in place in 2021 to transition the main grid to 50 per cent renewables by 2030 – said in July last year that small and large-scale solar have reached a 16.4 per cent of total annual generation on the grid, up from 5.4 per cent in 2017-18.
Rooftop solar was the largest contributor, making up 83.2 per cent of all renewable energy and 13.7 per cent of the total energy generated in the DKES, the report says. Large-scale solar contributed just 2.8 per cent.
According to the review, there are six large-scale solar generators connected to the DKES with a combined total capacity of about 68.2 megawatts (MW), four of which started dispatching energy into the DKES in 2023 and 2024.
The report says the remaining two solar farms are expected to begin dispatching electricity into the DKES in the second half of 2024 and that it is expected that the proportion of renewables on the grid will increase to 23.2 per cent in 2024-25.
Construction of the territory’s first big battery, a 35 megawatt, one hour battery in Darwin, has been completed and operations were expected to begin at the end of last year.
To soak up some of the rooftop solar, Northern Territory is also installing 16 community-scale batteries across the Darwin-Katherine electricity network as part of the federal government funding scheme.
More promisingly, the CLP government, which came into power in the NT in August last year, in November announced plans for a $400 million renewable hub on the outskirts of Darwin – comprised of six solar farms and battery storage.
The proposal envisages six different solar farms side by side and with a total capacity of around 210 megawatts, along with a big battery energy storage system.
The site proposed by energy minister Gerard Maley is on 940 hectares of Crown Land, near existing network infrastructure and not far from the Middle Arm industrial hub, and all its power will be fed into the local grid.
“It is great for the economy and great for the environment, but the Darwin REH will also enable enhanced energy security and grid resilience, as well as place downward pressure on electricity bills,” Maley said in a statement at the time.
The CLP has also been enthusiastic about the role of gas in the Territory’s economy and power generation mix, with its policy plan claiming that gas (a fossil fuel) from the Beetaloo is “cleaner than fossil fuels,” and can be used to transition to renewables and “create a new clean energy source.”
The Beetaloo Basin covers 28,000sq km with a resource estimated as being equivalent to more than a thousand times annual domestic gas consumption in Australia. But research released last year warned that shale gas from the area 500km southeast of Darwin could lose out to large quantities of cheaper LNG due to come online.
