Tasmanian Times spoke to former Greens’ Leader Christine Milne today in the wake of various election campaign statements about the Marinus Link project.

Tasmanian Times
My question is, to my mind, the numbers don’t really stack up. Tasmania doesn’t need power from the mainland. And given the costs – we know that Basslink was a financial disaster – selling power to the mainland, that’s not really going to make us any money either. So what’s actually driving this?

Christine Milne
It’s a very good question what’s driving this because it’s not common sense. It’s not economic sense. It’s not even in the best interests of Tasmania. All I can assume is it’s some fantasy that Hydro Tasmania and Guy Barnett dreamt up at some point. Certainly Peter Ray, when he was here, had this idea of Tasmania being the little green battery of the nation. That came from that era. So that’s what they’re thinking, that Tasmania will somehow help to drive the energy transition on the mainland. But when you pull it apart, it makes no sense.

Technology has moved so fast that the mainland does not need energy from Tasmania. That’s the first point. You will see the roll-out of mega new renewables all over the mainland. Every state is hoping to sell energy to another state. So we don’t need it. So why would you do it? Why would you enter another debacle like Basslink?

Well, I go back to Basslink. The Greens opposed Basslink at the time, Liberal and Labor said it was wonderful. We had Jim Bacon and Paul Lennon at the time. And David Crean was switched from the parliament across to the Hydro. They drove Basslink and what have we had? Nothing but economic disaster. Has anyone ever held them accountable? No, of course not.

Basslink is in receivership, or was in receivership or administration I should say. APA has bought them out of administration for a sum of $773 million. Now APAwould not have done that, had it not had the nod from the state government that Tasmania would support them in their bid to have it made a regulated asset. But Jeremy Rockliff has never admitted to that, neither has Guy Barnett. So, to take that to the next step, APA has now launched its application with the Australian Energy Regulator to make Basslink a regulated asset. And APA has asked the Australian Energy Regulator for a return of 112 million a year.

Now, the way it works is that the jurisdictions under the Australian Electricity Market rules, the jurisdictions at each end of the cable pay 50% each. And so 112 million means 56 million is coming (as a liability) to Tasmania, if Basslink is made a regulated asset and the AER thinks that 112 million is a fair price.

Now that $56 million will have to be absorbed by TasNetworks. Now, do they absorb that? Or do they pass it on? They’ve got to pass it on.

So on and on it goes, that is the debacle.

How many times over have we paid for Basslink? If you think, we paid something like or more than 90 million a year in all the years. So how much have we paid all up for this complete debacle? And yet we’re about to do it again with Marinus Link. It makes absolutely no sense.

Tasmania is pretty self sufficient in power now. We not only have the Hydro assets, but we’ve got functioning wind farms in Tasmania, and we’ve got an enormous potential for solar that is unrealised So we don’t need to be attached to the mainland with Marinus Link. I would ditch the whole thing right now and have a conversation in Tasmania about, well, what do we want power to do in Tasmania? We own this asset, so what do we want it to do?

Tasmanian demand has been pretty constant for the last decade, a little bit of an increase in recent years but pretty constant. So if we need more power, where do we want it to come from? And what do we want it to do? Well I think we need to electrify our agricultural system, we need to electrify our transport system. But we could do that by rolling out solar across the rooves of Hobart and Launceston. Hydro could own the asset and pay rental to the roof, to the owner of the house, for example. That would help to electrify suburbs, to get the technology so that suburbs are ready for electric vehicles because there’s no plan in Tasmania at the moment to have electric vehicle readiness particularly in the lowest socio-economic suburbs. So this would be a way of doing that.

You could also pull the plug on Lake Pedder, save the Hydro spending up to 100 million rebuilding the Edgar Dam and the Scotts Peak dam. And if you needed more power – 57 megawatts is what Lake Pedder feeds into the grid every year – you could get that from a floating array on Lake Gordon, for example. It opens up so many possibilities.

What it also does is take away all the land use conflict. We’ve got huge land use conflict now. Nobody wanted Robbins Island; only the developer wants Robbins Island. But we’re subsidising it by the extended North-west Transmission Development. We are putting multi-millions into that not for Tasmania’s benefit but just to facilitate a private developer being able to send their power to the mainland over Marinus Link.

We’ve also got enormous conflict in those communities with the transmission line. We’ve got conflict at St Patrick’s Plains. We’ve got conflict – well the Stanley one has now been cancelled – there’s now one proposed and it’s going to be enormous conflict over Whaleback Ridge in the Tarkine. None of this is for Tasmanians. They’re asking us to trash our own environment, upset our own communities for power that’s not for us and it’s not even needed. And ultimately, we pay. It makes no sense at all.

Labor is saying, ‘we need more power in Tasmania’. And I say, ‘Oh well, why? What do we need the power to do?’ They say, ‘Oh to enable investment’.

Tasmanian Times
Like in hydrogen, for example?

Christine Milne
Yes hydrogen, for example. What they’re not saying is that Twiggy Forrest, Woodside and Origin have all said they’re only interested in investing in hydrogen at Bell Bay if they get the power for a bulk discount price. So here we go again, the whole Comalco, the whole bulk discount price thing.

Tasmanian Times
There’s also no transparency on those prices, we still don’t really know what –

Christine Milne
Exactly, we have no idea except we know that they’re giveaway prices. So why would we subsidise, build, pay for new generation capacity so that Twiggy Forrest and Origin and Woodside can make more mega profits at Bell Bay? And there is no competitive advantage in Bell Bay for producing hydrogen. If you’re going to produce hydrogen in Australia, it will be some super mega solar farm up in the Northern Territory or somewhere like that. It is not going to be at Bell Bay.

But the key point is, if Dean Winter wants a hydrogen industry, then he’s prepared to sell energy to multi-billionaire people and companies at a bulk discount price. And that means we the Tasmanian consumers subsidise it, just as we have for generations. 40% of Tasmanian power generation already goes to four companies at discount prices. That has to stop. What about actually giving Tasmanians a fair go first, rather than these multinational corporations?