Premier's vision of green industry magnet

Hobart Mercury
Tuesday 20/10/2009 Page: 10


PREMIER David Bartlett has unveiled plans for Tasmania to double the number and size of its wind farms and to become an island known around the world for its renewable energy generation. The Government is also considering building a second $1 billion-plus Basslink power cable across Bass Strait in the decade ahead and to encourage investors in wind, solar, geothermal and wave power with incentives. Crucial issues to be dealt with include whether to allow private companies to build and operate wind and solar farms to sell electricity into the grid in competition with monopoly government-owned power generator Hydro Tasmania.

Mr Bartlett said lie wants to look at the issue of paying private generators attractive "feed-in" tariffs for power produced, which would also be paid to home owners generating excess solar energy. "If we are truly to stamp ourselves on the imagination of the world as a renewable energy [island], we need to be thinking 10 to 20 years down the track," Mr Bartlett said. "So while Basslink 2 is not seriously on the drawing board, if we are going to double our renewable energy contribution to the world we need a way of selling that power."

Mr Bartlett envisages Tasmania's economy becoming centred on the sale of premium "green" power interstate and to new hi-tech industries drawn to Tasmania because of the availability of renewable electricity. He told the Mercury yesterday that the Government is already pushing to attract international "server farms" and mega-data centres to Tasmania He described these massive electronic and computer centres, storing data for corporations such as Google, the Commonwealth Bank. BHP Billiton or foreign governments, as akin to telephone call centres of the 1990s.

Many international companies are currently searching the globe for multiple safe, stable places to store their digital data, so as to spread the risk of irreplaceable files being destroyed through terrorism, accidents, fires or earthquakes. Tasmania is considered an ideal location - once it has ultra-high speed optical fibre cables connections to the outside world through the National Broadband network - because it is quiet, remote, politically and geographical stable, has a low terrorism risk and an English speaking, educated population.

Some high-profile companies and brands also want to be able to tell their customers their data storage and retrieval centres - which use large amounts of power - are not contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Out of the optic fibre rollout, data farming is one of the great opportunities," Mr Bartlett explained. "What it does is take our very successful call centre strategy and move it a notch up the food chain - which is good because the skills that are required are greater, and they are higher paid jobs." Mr Bartlett said there is also an opportunity for local companies to be established offering aggregated data centres and data space for companies to buy. He said the State Government could conceivably run such a centre or offer its own data to be stored in a private facility as the "lead tenant" to help encourage such entrepreneurs.

Other ideas being considered by Mr Bartlett include:

• More wind farms across western and northern Tasmania, with Robbins Islandland in the North-West a top priority.
• Locating data centres and new industries wanting to use green power next to new wind farms, as data transmission costs less than power transmission.
• Broadening the number of companies searching and researching geothermal power options in Tasmania.
• Encouraging the University of Tasmania to partly move to the Hobart waterfront rail yards site, with senior secondary polytechnic and academy campuses co-located alongside.

Many of the Premier's ideas for a new Tasmania are based on discussions with his mentor and close friend Professor Jonathan West, director of the Hobart-based Australian Innovation Research Centre. Professor West will today present his report to Mr Bartlett detailing his own "innovations strategy" for Tasmania, described as a "a new vision for economic development". Central to his proposal is understood to be a call to expand Tasmania's current $400 million irrigation expansion plans to a massive $2 billion irrigation infrastructure spend, creating the state as Australia's future food bowl.