State Government to pursue legal action against Basslink over 2015 outage

THE State Government will pursue damages from Basslink over the 2015 outage that severed Tasmania’s connection to the mainland and sparked a six-month energy crisis.

THE State Government will pursue damages from Basslink over the 2015 outage that severed Tasmania’s connection to the mainland and sparked a six-month energy crisis.

Energy Minister Guy Barnett said the Government had informed Basslink it was owed for damages over the incident, and would start legal action next week unless compensation was agreed. The energy crisis is estimated to have cost the state $140 million.

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The Government action is the latest in an escalating spat between the parties, which comes as the state considers the viability of a second Bass Strait interconnector to allow more exporting of renewable energy.

“The actual capability of the Basslink facilities and the way in which the Basslink cable has been operated may constitute a breach of the state’s rights under the Basslink operations agreement,” Mr Barnett said.

“We have never accepted the original assertion that the cable outage in 2015 was the result of a ‘cause unknown’.”

A Hydro Tasmania report released in December found the outage had been caused by the cable being operated at 630MW for extended periods, rather than the recommended continuous limit of 500MW.

It agreed to continue paying Basslink until the end of March.

Repairs to the Basslink cable.

Basslink agreed to temporarily operate the interconnector at 500MW while it considered the Hydro report in detail and consulted with the cable’s manufacturer.

“The expert reports into the cable failure delivered in December 2017 indicate that [Basslink] had operated the cable in a manner that allowed it to exceed its temperature design limits during a number of periods in its service life,” Mr Barnett said.

Basslink chief executive Malcolm Eccles in December described Hydro’s findings as “hocus pocus”.

Mr Eccles said Hydro’s explanation supported Basslink consultant Cable Consulting International’s findings that the fault’s cause was unknown.

“They’re not based on any facts, they’re not based on testing a piece of cable, they’re purely based on a model that somebody’s created in a lab and it doesn’t even use real parameters of cable measurement,” he said at the time.

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s a model, it’s theoretical, it’s up in the air, it’s hocus pocus.”

Basslink was contacted for comment.