Barron Gorge hydro station offline until at least June after damage from Cyclone Jasper
Flooding from last week’s cyclone in Far North Queensland is disrupting the state’s power supply, with a key hydropower station now offline for six months.
A hydropower station in Queensland’s north has been forced offline for six months after suffering extensive damage from flooding caused by Cyclone Jasper.
The Queensland government-owned CleanCo says the 66 megawatt Barron Gorge power station just outside Cairns will be out of action until at least June 2024 after a sixty-year old earth wall adjacent to its water intake structure at the Kuranda weir washed away.
Taking capacity away from Queensland’s power supply comes at a time when the state’s grid is under mounting pressure as hundreds of thousands of homes endured blackouts which could last for days, following a powerful thunderstorm on Christmas night in Brisbane.
A CleanCo spokesman told The Australian the Barron Gorge Hydro station is offline pending an assessment of the damage and repair plan.
“CleanCo will be in a position to further assess the damage once water levels subside, however, we anticipate the power station will be offline until June 2024, noting significant damage has occurred and further assessments will be undertaken,” the statement read.
“All Barron Gorge Hydro employees are safe and accounted for.”
The Barron Gorge station was commissioned in 1963 and replaced an earlier station at the site which was the first underground power station in Australia and the first hydro-electric station in Queensland.
The 66MW Barron Gorge run-of-river hydro facility is part of CleanCo’s fleet of over 1000MW of dispatchable generation.
“While this unexpected outage is unfortunate, our fleet of clean generation assets ensures we will be able to supply our customers’ energy needs until Barron Gorge returns to service,” CleanCo said.
CleanCo also overseas the 570MW pumped storage hydro facility at Wivenhoe west of Brisbane and the 320MW Western Downs Green Power solar hub.
Cairns saw extensive damage and flooding caused by over 600mm in rainfall from the cyclone. The damage bill from Cyclone Jasper is expected to hit $1bn after it caused widespread damage to homes, roads and infrastructure, making landfall as a Category 2 tropical cyclone off the eastern coast of the Cape York Peninsula.
It saw Cairns Airport halt operations due to low visibility and the extreme flooding occurring on the landing strip of the airport.
Queensland’s energy grid has been under pressure in recent days as relentless thunderstorms in southeast Queensland have seen more than 100,000 homes left without power. On Christmas night there more than 875 downed power lines following a storm with the state-owned Energex warning power could be out for days.
Queensland Premier Steven Miles said the Christmas storm was “unprecedented” with 123,000 homes without power. He added power outages were mostly condensed to Logan and the Gold Coast, with providers having never seen such damage before.
“They’ve never seen concrete power poles taken down,” he said at a media conference.
“It’s going to take a long time for us to get power back on to everybody’s homes.”
As of June, 26 per cent of Queensland’s energy consumption was sourced from renewables. Under new laws, this will rise to 50 per cent by 2030, 70 per cent by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035.
As part of the plan to end Queensland’s reliance on coal power by 2035, generators will be converted to clean energy hubs, but be kept as “backup capacity” until replacement pumped hydro energy storage is operational and reliable.
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Originally published as Barron Gorge hydro station offline until at least June after damage from Cyclone Jasper
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