Fault found in Basslink cable 100km offshore

TASMANIA’S electricity highway has come to a costly standstill because of a fault in the $800 million Basslink ­undersea cable.

Laying the Basslink Interconnector cable in 2004. Must credit Basslink.

TASMANIA’S electricity highway has come to a costly standstill because of a fault in the $800 million Basslink ­undersea cable.

Sunday’s breakdown was only revealed on Tuesday and means no power is being sent from Tasmania to Victorian cust­omers and no power is being imported to save the water Hydro Tasmania has left in its dams.

Basslink is working on a 60-day outage contingency, but the breakdown has given the State Government cause to ­rethink the planned sale of the planned sale of the State’s back-up gas-fired power plant in the Tamar Valley.

Energy Minister Matt Groom said Hydro Tasmania was still in a position to meet all of Tasmania’s energy needs, but the breakdown also strengthened the government’s push for a second cable link to be built.

Hydro Tasmania has been importing 40 per cent of the state’s energy demand from Victoria since October in the face of low dam storage levels and decided only last week that it would need to restart the Tamar Valley Power Station to meet demand.

The station has been out of action for 18 months amid plans for its sale and was expected to fire back up in mid January.

Hydro Tasmania CEO Steve Davy said they would now investigate bringing forward that date.

Mr Davy said there was no doubt the fault would create further challenges on top of the record dry experienced in Tasmania over the past four months. Storages currently stand at 24.6 per cent.

Mr Groom said Hydro Tasmania had been instructed to suspend its proposed sale process and review its electricity contingency plans in the face of the Basslink outage, which he called a significant event.

Opposition Leader Bryan Green said the indefinite outage would put enormous pressure on energy supply.

He also accused the Government of keeping Tasmanians in the dark about the problem as the cable, which has been transporting electricity for a decade and is the second longest submarine power cable in the world, had been down since Sunday.

A government spokesman told the Mercury that the market was advised of the problem straight away and Mr Groom was told on Tuesday morning.

Basslink could not say how much the repair operation would cost.

Cable joining experts will need to be bought in from Italy to fix the fault which is thought to be in a section of cable situated on the ocean floor about 100km off Tasmania’s coast.

And the boat needed to take the foreign crew into Bass Strait to bring the 60kg per metre cable to the surface for repair works needs to come from Noumea.

“It is not as simple as changing a light globe,” a Basslink spokesman said.

“We are comfortable we know where the fault lies and we have begun the process of assembling a team of experts who will provide diagnosis and repair the fault and return the interconnector to service as soon as possible.”

Basslink is a private company and Tasmanian taxpayers will not be paying for repairs.

It is the first time, other than a two-hour outage in 2006, that Basslink has stopped due to a fault with the underwater cable. In 2010, a breakdown at the land-based converter station at George Town took 10 days to repair.

Broadband services to customers have not been affected