It's a question Tasmanians have been pondering – initially
with humour, but increasingly with concern – since late last year.
On December 20, Basslink – the $800 million, 290-kilometre
submarine cable connecting Tasmania with Victoria and in recent times provided
up to 40 per cent of its electricity – stopped working. Nobody knows why.
Read Adam Morton’s story in the BusinessDay section in today’s
Melbourne Age - “Tasmania battles to keep lights on with cloud-seeding and diesel generators.”
(Climate change
promises many things, among them difficulties we are not in the least prepared
for. One of the complications is presently unfolding in Tasmania, as explained
by Adam Morton.
Tasmania has, since
being first settled by Europeans, been a place endowed with a regular and
reliable supply of water, so much so that the state’s power system has been built
around and depends upon hydro-electricity, but now difference in the weather
system, a direct outcome of climate change, puts the state in a precarious
situation.
The island state has
been celebrated for it investment and reliance on hydro-electricity, but
complicating that equation is Basslink.
The trans-Bass
Strait cable that links the state to the national power grid was first
discussed in 2000 to become operational in 2006 and for years now, Tasmania had
been drawing some 40 per cent of its power from Victoria, which depends almost
entirely upon coal-fired power, with the pre-eminent power station being Yallourn,
which by world standards is antiquated and desperately out of date, polluting
and in carbon-dioxide terms, “dirty”.
So here we are –
Australia’s “greenest state” is feeling the effects of climate change and has
been relying heavily on a power supplies coming from one of the world’s
dirtiest power stations.
The short term
solution, Morton discusses, is the extensive use of diesel powered generators
that will in fact only worsen the difficulties already facing Tasmania – Robert McLean.)
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