HYDRO THE BEST WAY
H Y D R O - E L E C - TRICITY and not coal power is North Queensland’s big opportunity to be a powerhouse, according to an energy expert who is calling for a serious look at schemes on the Burdekin and Tully rivers.
Professor Simon Bartlett is the Powerlink Australian chair in Electricity Transmission at the University of Queensland and led investigations into hydro- electricity in the 1980s by the former State Electricity Corporation of Queensland.
Prof Bartlett has described current plans to raise the Burdekin Falls Dam by 2m and install a small 30- 50 megawatt hydro plant as “pipsqueak” schemes which would underdevelop one of the best water resources in the country.
He has called for a proper assessment to develop the resources.
“You really have a Snowy Mountains engineering scheme in North Queensland ( on the Burdekin Falls Dam). It just needs to be developed,” Prof Bartlett said.
Reports obtained by the Townsville Bulletin show the State Government’s Department of Environment and Resource Management in 2007 decided to limit the wall raising to 2m, initially planned for 14.6m, while engineers for dam owner SunWater stated in 2009 that a 500MW hydro power station, also envisaged in original plans, was unlikely to be constructed and so did not include it in design work.
SunWater, which wants to raise the dam wall 2m to improve its safety in the event of a megastorm, is now saying it is considering construction “with the hydro where possible”, while state generation company Stanwell is limiting hydro studies to the existing infrastructure and water allocations.
Prof Bartlett said development of storage below the Burdekin Falls Dam with a weir at the Leichhardt Range could support 1000MW pumped storage hydro plant.
“If we are serious about moving to 50 per cent renewables in Queensland, we are only going to achieve that if we also build large energy storage and hydro pumped storage is one tenth the cost of battery storage,” Prof Bartlett said.
“We are going to need hydro pumped storage and North Queensland has a number of fantastic sites on the Tully River and at the Burdekin Falls Dam. They need to be developed in parallel with all of the wind and solar which is already being developed in the North.”
About 1000MW of solar and wind is under development west of Cairns, in Townsville, Hughenden, the Burdekin Shire and around Collinsville.
Prof Bartlett said North Queensland hydro schemes considered in the 1970s and ’ 80s were “very, very low cost” compared with other similar projects in Australia with the 600MW Tully- Millstream scheme costed around $ 450 million in 1987. That translated to $ 1.2 to $ 1.3 billion today and not the $ 4 billion figure quoted by former treasurer Curtis Pitt in State Parliament last year. But Prof Bartlett said it was not just a question of price but reliability.