After an extreme storm damaged the power cable from the Australian mainland in late 2015, the island of Tasmania faced an energy drought. To make things worse, it faced a real drought too, depleting its available hydro dams. This stressed its electricity security to its limits for six long months. Then the island state announced Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation plan to prevent this ever happening again.
The Short Term Actions Tasmania Took
While energy scientists were conceiving how Tasmanias Battery of the Nation strategy might look, the government assembled a stopgap. This took the form of 80 diesel generators to supplement the output of Tasmania’s only peaking gas power station.
It was just as well the cable damage happened when it did. Because the government had been considering decommissioning the only gas-fired power station, since they used it so seldom in the past. Since then, Tasmania has decided to become a potential energy powerhouse for Australia.
The Basis for Tasmanias Battery of the Nation Plan
Tasmania has a cool temperate climate and a mountainous interior. This lends itself to a wet climate where none of the major cities has more than 61 clear days a year, on average. Consequently, Tasmania has a large number of dams that trap the water flowing from the mountains down to the coast.
Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation project envisages connecting adjacent dams with tunnels for pump storage. The upper ones will function as ‘batteries’, with kinetic energy stored in the water.
“We’re certainly confident there’s at least 2,500 MW of reliable and cost-effective pumped hydro potential in Tasmania,” says Chris Gwynne, Hydro Tasmania’s director for the program.
On January 20th, 2018, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the vast majority of sites would need less than two kilometers of tunnel. The program carries a hefty price tag of $5 billion. A Nimitz nuclear aircraft carrier costs $8.5 billion. We know which one we would prefer if we had a choice of alternative natural storage batteries.
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