AUGUST 8, 2016 …
Ed: It’s time to revisit this … again …
• ABC: Major industrials weighing up their future in Tasmania, says Bryan Green The Tasmanian Treasurer is challenging the Opposition Leader to name which major industrial has been spooked by the Government’s energy policies …
• Pete Godfrey in Comments: I read a very interesting letter a couple of days ago, from a retired technician. His letter was about the Basslink cable. With the help of a few retired technician friends they have come to the conclusion that the Basslink cable was hit at speed by a large heavy object. So it seems that something being dragged by a vessel caused the damage to the cable. Was it the Super Trawler, or a Scallop Dredge. Hopefully someone will have details of what vessels were operating in the area of the damage when the cable went down. Then they will have to decide who is to blame. Was the cable laid on the surface of the sea bed rather than being buried? Were the regulations around shipping and trawling near the cable too lax? Whichever way it goes, we will end up paying. Some lunatic will soon decide that we need more cables just in case it happens again.
JANUARY 16, 2016 …
Ed: It’s time to revisit this … Sacked staff have been hired and the plant taken out of mothballs in order to restart the Tamar Valley Power Station. I believe we have been and/or still are paying for Take or Pay contracts for the gas even when the power station is closed; the contracts being protected under commercial-in-confidence legislation. Will the Premier elucidate? At least with the reopening of the power station we will now use the gas we pay for. How did the Bass Link Cable get damaged? It has been suggested in jest to me that it was ripped up by the factory freezer trawler? Well, the depth of Bass Strait is just a very shallow 50m, so it is very possible. Now that would be an Act of God … A God who exerts his vengeance on Tasmania for wreaking havoc over the land, sea and air in this most beautiful realm!
• Robert Mallett in Comments HERE: Tasmanian Small Business Council calls for commitment to Tamar Valley Power Station
• ABC: Tasmanian Government examines long-term green energy options after power woes
• Mercury Editorial: Double crisis pushes limits
• Richard Barton in Comments: The state of Tasmania can now be seen in the Examiner’s article on government salaries ( HERE: Sky-high incomes just don’t add up ). We are clearly being ripped off by third rate bureaucrats and politicians who don’t have the capability to assure security of basics like power, water, food, medical services, education and transport. We’re all working harder to sustain incompetent governors and managers and to pay even more to help recover from their hopeless efforts.
• Steve in Comments … The basic reality is that the hydro ran the dams low to cash in prior to the abolition of the carbon tax. The moment the tax structure changed, they should have been firing up the gas turbines. The gas bill should have been covered by the windfall profits just made and the dams allowed to refill. Instead, like any surplus money in Tasmania, the profits were siphoned off and all of a sudden we have a crisis of empty dams? …
JANUARY 7, 2014 …
• Gilmour … have you heard about a Tamar Valley power station?
In Sunday’s Examiner Martin Gilmour (above), aka the Whistle Blower, continued his anti-Green rants — this time over electricity prices.
“All that Australia has succeeded in doing is pricing ourselves into poverty in some vain attempt to save the world and justify the hysteria of Greens like Christine Milne and Cassy O’Connor.”
Gilmour, have you heard about a Tamar Valley Power Station?
I suggest that it is this that in your words is “pricing us into poverty”.
For the past 5 years Aurora, and now Hydro, have been making Tasmanians pay serious sums for what is a mothballed — but still gas-consuming power station in the Tamar Valley.
This giant white elephant was commenced with a contract price of $450 million in 2007 for Babcock and Brown, about to be owners of the gas supplier Alinta.
Alinta was to receive some $600 million for a contracted 25-year gas supply — as agreed and supported by the Lennon State Government. This contract allowed a group of financial spivs at B&B to borrow the money to build this now mothballed State-owned project.
B&B went into liquidation in 2009 – but before it died in 2008, in a rapid-fire transaction, it sold the partly-constructed power station to the the State Government for $100 million plus ongoing completion costs; the contract being signed on our behalf by that financial genius Michael Aird.
The poisoned chalice was then passed to Aurora Energy who blew a further $260 million to complete a gas-eating power station because of a locked-in, long-term Take or Pay contract from 2009.
Tasmanians are blessed with hydro power to generate our electricity. Yet since 2009 we have had a gas-fired power station as backup in case it did not rain.
This turned a small community on a small island with the world’s cheapest power source into the world’s 11th most expensive place to generate electricity. That is unless you run a smelter, but who cares, for every three months the mug Tasmanians will still pay their electricity bills just to keep the smelters in business.
This gas-fired power station is now mothballed but the Take or Pay contract, or its successor, is still the killer. By 2010 Aurora was looking at an impairment charge of $340 million over the power station and the Government had promised to cap electricity charges at 5%; this was canned so that Aurora – at our expense and with a large increase in electricity bills – was able to survive.
If we need electricity for smelters we can import electricity from the mainland; this costs but you do at least get electricity for the money.
Gilmour … put your dogs on to investigating the Take or Pay gas contracts and stop all this bleating about the Greens.
In July 2013 Aurora finally got out of the firing line for it flicked the mortally-wounded power station to Hydro Tasmania for $205 million, thereby pushing Hydro’s debt to more than a billion dollars and crystallising for Aurora some $250 million of losses of taxpayers’ money on the way through.
The gas contract outcomes and the costs remain unknown under commercial-in-confidence contracts.
Under 150 thousand Tasmanian households now wear and service this Tasmanian electricity debt which has increased over 5 years by some $450 million – split between two state-owned enterprises. These two GBE’s need to fleece Tasmanians by pushing up the price of electricity to the mums and dads so as to help finance these self-inflicted debts.
Meanwhile not a Squeak out of Hodgman the Leader of a non-existent Opposition – or your cutting-edge newspaper, The ‘Examiner’.
Gilmour … this has nothing to do with the Greens or the Carbon Price but a lot to do with backing losers; how could anybody be stupid enough to buy a bad business from a bankrupt-with-nowhere-to-go … and lose a minimum of 300 million dollars in less than three years?
The Carbon Price would have delivered between 100 and 300 million dollars per annum to a clean and green water-powered Tasmania. We have been paying $17 million p.a. in carbon tax on a now closed Tamar Valley gas-fired generating system. The Liberals will steal the rest with no Carbon Tax in their time.
The saga was investigated by an “Electricity Supply Industry Expert Panel” chaired by John Pierce, GPO Box 123, Hobart. it is viewable on the web ( Here )and should be compared with the Government’s sanitised version.
It is a killer.
Well worth a read Mr Gilmour; well worth a read.
As you raised the matter … will you as the self-proclaimed Tasmanian public Whistle Blower get your newspaper to look into this serious scandal?
Please do not blame the Greens … they voted against the acquisition and you and yours to date have never uttered a word …
Earlier on Tasmanian Times:
• John Hawkins: Martin Gilmour, Here is a quick lesson
• John Lawrence: Hydro Tasmania: The fall guy?
• Pete Godfrey, in Comments: Just a short list of bad decisions: Selling – Royal Derwent Hospital for $350 thousand when it was valued at $65 million. – Using Retirement benefit funds to buy a grossly overpriced Hobart Airport. – Flogging off Brighton Army base for $180 thousand when it was valued at $6.5 million. – Selling the Old LGH because it was a derelict building (now it is a 5 star hotel and conference centre). – Basslink. – Tamar power station. – Gunns special deals, compensation and gifting them our native forests and paying them to take it. Bringing Ta Ann to Tasmania to finish off the pillaging of our forests. When do they have to take responsibility.
• Steve, in Comments: Since the supply of witches dried up, they write editorials about the Greens instead.
