Clean power in the wind

Weekend Australian
Saturday 6/6/2009 Page: 7

Renewable energy projects could create thousands of construction jobs, writes Keith Orchison
ONE of Australia's leading renewable energy companies says the enlarged zero emissions power generation target proposed by the federal Government will stimulate about $25 billion in infrastructure investment and create tens of thousands of jobs in the next decade, many in regional areas.

Rob Grant, chief executive of Pacific Hydro, which has plans for 600MW of projects costing $2 billion, says its own developments alone will "create thousands of jobs" in areas such as road building, concreting, steel fixing and steel fabrication. He says the jobs that can be created if the Government's RET legislation is processed quickly are those that may be now under pressure because of the global financial crisis and are "easily transferable" from sectors such as mining.

The Government proposes a new target for renewable energy of 20% of Australian power consumption by 2020 and aims to support the scheme with a $65,000 per gigawatt hour charge on energy retailers who fail to take up their quota of the target.

On the basis that national electricity demand will rise to 300,000GWh a year by 2020, and allowing for 9500GWh of supply under the Howard government's MRET scheme, plus 15,000GWh of generation by hydro-electric plants (which don't benefit from the scheme), the target for new renewable energy will be about 35,000GWh annually at the end of the next decade.

Support for the view that this, and other carbon policy plans, will lead to a surge in renewable energy development comes from the latest electricity review published by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics. The ABARE study reports the present policy situation saw just two windfarms completed in the past year: Pacific Hydro's $130 million addition of 58MW to its Portland operations in Victoria and Acciona Energy of Spain's $400 million project.

The 192MW Waubra development is the largest in the southern hemisphere and contains 192MW of turbines spread over 170 sq km of rural Victoria. ABARE also reports that seven more windfarms are at an advanced stage of development in South Australia, Tasmania, NSW (to feed electricity to Canberra) and Victoria. They will have a total capacity of 603MW and cost up to $1.5 billion.

Looking ahead, ABARE says there are 9.4GW of renewable energy plants on the drawing boards for Australia in various stages of feasibility study. More than 8.2GW of this capacity will be constructed in windfarms: 11 in NSW, 20 in Victoria, two each in Queensland and Western Australia and 15 in South Australia. The largest in this category is the Silverton Windfarm near Broken Hill in NSW, with a planned capacity of 1GW, proposed by German developer Epuron, and, if built, it will cost $2.2 billion. If it goes ahead, it will be one of the largest in the world and easily the biggest in the southern hemisphere.

Another big development is under consideration for Cooper's Gap in Queensland by AGL Energy and Windlab Systems. Located 65km south of Dalby, it could have a capacity of 440MW, operating as many as 250 turbines, and cost $1.2 billion.

A critical factor in the delivery of this massive increase in remote generation over the next 10 years will be the capacity to build new high-voltage transmission lines to connect the wind turbines and other renewable plants to the grids delivering power in eastern Australia and the southwest of Western Australia, where the main loads are found. It is estimated that some $4.5 billion will need to be spent on transmission, also creating hundreds more jobs.

Mark Diesendorf, deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales and a prominent advocate of renewable energy, has expressed disappointment that the federal budget made no provision for new and strengthened transmission links to support windfarms and other clean energy developments.

If the federal Government upgraded the transmission lines linking South Australia to NSW and Victoria," he says, "wind energy capacity could be greatly augmented, and a commitment to a new high-voltage line to link the geothermal region in north-east South Australia to the main grid would also he valuable."