It doesn’t have to be a choice between

Can we have both a new hydrogen industry, and Marinus Link? Andrew Catchpole argues that we can

CONFUSION exists about whether, in pursuing an opportunity for large-scale green hydrogen production to meet domestic and export market opportunities, Tasmania is undermining the opportunities for development of our renewable energy resources that are presented by Marinus Link and the Battery of the Nation initiatives.

It is estimated that the Tasmanian electricity system can support a new major industry such as hydrogen up to about 300MW of load, or about the equivalent of our current largest electricity consumer, Bell Bay Aluminium. To do so, Tasmania needs to develop new renewable energy resources, most likely wind, to provide the energy consumed by the new load.

The existing hydro system and transmission network also need to be fit for the task, which may require some additional investment in the network or operational changes for the hydro system.

Tasmania has excellent wind resources, allowing wind farms to generate their installed capacity between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of the time, on average. This means a 300MW load will need 600MW to 750MW of new wind generation installed to provide its energy.

With the actual wind speed varying widely, this means that at any given time a new wind farm will be generating more than the new load, or less. At this scale the “unders and overs’’ are catered for within our wider electricity system, through the flexibility to ramp our hydro generation up or down relatively quickly and vary the direction of flow over Basslink over a slightly longer time frame.

Once the new load and the wind generation to supply it becomes much larger, say two or three times that initial scale, the ability of the existing Tasmanian system, including Basslink, to flex sufficiently to manage the variability in generation becomes challenged. This is where Marinus Link comes in. By quadrupling the available interconnection to Victoria, Tasmania can meet the additional load with southward link flows when the wind generation is low, and dispatch surplus generation northwards on the link when wind generation is high. Even with our flexible hydro power system assisted by new pumped-hydro energy storage, a new large-scale hydrogen industry will depend on Marinus Link if it grows to the size of the projected opportunity.

There is an impact from the large load needed to support a hydrogen industry on the Marinus Link economic assessment. However,