Toowoomba council spends $4.6m to investigate pumped hydro project at Cressbrook Dam, as transparency concerns raised

After nearly five years, the council can reveal how much it has spent investigating a company’s plan for a $1.5bn pumped hydro project using Cressbrook Dam.

Aerial photograph of Lake Cressbrook, Thursday, January 05, 2012. Photo Kevin Farmer / The Chronicle Helicopter services courtesy of Heliwest Group

More than $4.6m in ratepayers’ money has been spent by Toowoomba Regional Council on a secret $1.5bn pumped hydro project at Cressbrook Dam, with the council admitting there are no guarantees regarding its future success.

Spending figures for the Cressbrook Dam new energy generation project were finally released this week, following a motion by deputy mayor Rebecca Vonhoff at March’s ordinary meeting to shed more light on the previously-confidential matter.

It comes as BE Power, which is the only proponent that made it through the early tender stages, prepares to sell its energy storage scheme to the state government-owned Stanwell Corporation.

If successful, the project would see 6.4 gigalitres of the region’s largest water source (about eight per cent of its capacity) used to generate 400MW of clean energy for up to 10 hours a day.

Councillor Rebecca Vonhoff. Picture: Kevin Farmer

The net cost so far to the council of $4.6m includes more than $2m for the initial tender process between 2019 and 2022, $3m for due diligence around pumped hydro as a concept, and nearly $400,000 in reimbursements from BE Power.

Dr Vonhoff said she had been “uncomfortable” with the lack of transparency from council around the development of the project, hoping the investment disclosure would improve residents’ knowledge and awareness of it.

“I haven’t liked how much of this conversation hasn’t been held in the public and I think the public, the ratepayers and the residents have a right to know more about what is going on with it,” she said.

“You ask the average person how much they do know about the pumped hydro project and you either get that they don’t know about it at all or that there’s a lot of confusion about how much work has been done and even people will say ‘is that up and running yet?’.

“The fact that there is so much variance in what people know about the project goes to show that there’s a hunger to know more about what’s going on and we need to be more open with it.”

A number of current and former councillors have publicly and privately expressed concern about the use of Cressbrook for pumped hydro, most notably ex-councillor Nancy Sommerfield who argued it could destroy the ecology of the dam.

Dr Vonhoff has also raised issues with it in the past, but stopped short of expressing opposition when asked by News Corp.

“The average person, the average resident, will have questions about this being our major water drinking source and if there would be any loss of water,” she said.

During the meeting, acting water and waste general manager Matt Torr said the council had spent a significant amount of money on due diligence to avoid developing an undesirable outcome for residents.

“The risk, of course, being if we didn’t do a proper full process, that we could risk awarding a tender to a proponent that turned out to not be in council’s best interests,” he said.

“Since we have resolved that the only remaining tenderer going through the process is BE Power in the pumped hydro project, the money has been spent far more on detailed due diligence around the project, noting that the proposal from BE Power is a proposal to build a hydro scheme in the order of $1.5bn.

“At this point in time there are no guarantees, so when we go to the next phase council we’ll have an opportunity to review where the project is up to and what has been proposed and we’ll need to make a decision as to whether to proceed or whether to not.”