The Guardian - Adam Morton
It was a coal town, predicted to be wiped out by the closure of two
ageing power plants. Now Port Augusta has 13 renewable projects in train
The
largest solar farm in the southern hemisphere lies on arid land at the
foot of the Flinders Ranges, more than 300km north of Adelaide. If that
sounds remote, it doesn’t do justice to how removed local residents feel
from what currently qualifies as debate in Canberra.
As government MPs and national newspapers thundered over whether taxpayers should underwrite new coal-fired power,
mauling advice from government agencies
as they went, residents of South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf region
have been left to ponder why decision-makers weren’t paying attention to
what is happening in their backyard.
What’s happening here is going to be happening on the eastern seaboard in the next 10 years.
Sam Johnson, mayor of Port Augusta
In mid 2016, this region was on the brink, hit by the closure and
near collapse of coal and steel plants. Now it’s on the cusp of a wave
of construction that investors and community leaders say should place
the region at the vanguard of green innovation – not just in Australia
but globally. There has been an explosion in investment, with $5bn
spread over the next five years. There are 13 projects in various stages
of development, with more than 3,000 construction and 200 ongoing jobs.
The economy of this once-deflated region has been transformed and those
who live here are starting to feel hopeful again.
The Port Augusta mayor, Sam Johnson, a 32-year-old former Liberal
member, is continually surprised at how resistant some are to the idea
that the energy environment has changed. “You might choose to ignore
what’s happening here now because we’re out of sight, out of mind, but
the reality is that what’s happening here is going to be happening on
the eastern seaboard in the next 10 years,” he says.
In
simple terms, the Upper Spencer Gulf transition story goes like this.
Port Augusta was a coal town, home to the state’s only two lignite – or
brown coal – plants, Playford B and Northern. Playford B, ageing and
failing, was mothballed in 2012. Northern, the larger and younger of the
two, closed in May 2016 when owner Alinta
Energy
decided it was no longer economically viable. The Leigh Creek mine that
supplied it, by then offering up mostly low-quality coal, shut at the
same time. About 400 workers at the plant and the mine lost their jobs.
Roughly a third retired, a third found other employment locally and a
third had to leave town to find work.
At
the same time, further around the gulf, the steel town of Whyalla was
teetering precipitously after the owner, Arrium, put the mill in
voluntary administration facing debts of more than $4bn.
 |
| A worker, Ben
Williams, inspects the interconnector under construction to service the
Lincoln Gap wind farm. Photograph: The Guardian |
Yet as the doom hit, there were also rays of hope as several clean power projects were mooted for the surrounding area.
Two years on, the Port Augusta city council lists 13 projects at varying stages of development. And Whyalla has unearthed a
potential saviour
in British billionaire industrialist Sanjeev Gupta, who not only bought
the steelworks but promised to expand it while also spending what will
likely end up being $1.5bn in solar, hydro and batteries to make it
viable.
Gupta says the logic behind his investment in solar and storage is simple: it’s now cheaper than coal.
Johnson says he expects the Upper Gulf region to receive $5bn in
clean energy investment over the next five years. “My gut feel – and I’m
an optimist – is that they will all go ahead,” he says. “They are
different technologies and they are playing in different markets, so
they are not competing for power purchase agreements.”
By any measure, the
Bungala solar power plant
is vast. Once its second stage is complete, 800,000 photovoltaic
modules will cover an area the size of the Melbourne central business
district. The scale is neatly summarised by Chris Rowe, the plant’s
operations manager and, with maintenance officer Andrew Bartsch, our
tour guide around the site. Both men recently returned to Port Augusta
after working away to take up positions with Enel Green Power. One day
Rowe decided to stroll back from the 275MW farm’s outer edge, weaving in
and out of the rows of panels as he went. By the time he got back to
his office, he had covered 12km. “At that point I thought, ‘gee, this is
really something’,” he says.Bungala
is nearing completion, with work on the $425m plant expected to be
finished by January. Its first section started feeding into the national
electricity grid in May. Further west, ground has been broken on the
59-turbine, 212MW
Lincoln Gap wind farm,
though progress has temporarily stalled after developer Nexif Energy
discovered unexploded ordnance from historic military testing on site.
Australia's renewable energy capital
Some major projects under development or proposed for the Upper Spencer Gulf
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|
As Guardian Australia visited the region, the South Australian Liberal government gave final approval for a $600m
hybrid wind-and-solar energy park
on the south-eastern edge of Port Augusta that proponent DP Energy says
will be the largest development of its kind in the country. A second
stage with more solar and a 400MW battery is slated to follow.
At Cultana, just north of Whyalla, Energy Australia is investigating building the country’s first
saltwater pumped hydro energy storage plant.
It would draw water from the Spencer Gulf, pump it uphill when energy
is plentiful and cheap, and convert it to hydro electricity at times of
high demand. A decision on the project is expected in 2019.
All are potentially agenda setting, but none are as anticipated as the
Aurora solar thermal power station. It is the culmination of a push that began in 2010. A research paper by advocacy group
Beyond Zero Emissions formed the basis for the creation of
Repower Port Augusta,
a community group that built widespread support for bringing the
developing technology to the region among councils, business and unions
US developer SolarReserve took notice. It plans to use a
field of mirrors to heat a molten salt system inside a 234-metre tower.
It will both generate electricity and store eight hours of energy that
can be sent out when the sun isn’t shining. The company says the $650m
plant, to be built at the Carriewerloo sheep station about 30km north of
Port Augusta, will be the world’s largest solar tower with storage and
provide 5% of the state’s energy needs.
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| The planned Aurora solar thermal plant will both generate electricity
and store eight hours of energy that can be sent out when the sun isn’t
shining.
|
The SolarReserve vice-president, Mary Grikas, stresses the plant will
operate “just like a conventional coal or gas power station, reliably
generating electricity day and night – except without any emissions”.
With the increasing emphasis on “firming” power to back up variable renewables,
solar thermal
is seen as a potentially major player in filling the gaps, along with
other fast-starting options such as pumped hydro, lithium-ion batteries
and peaking gas. The 150MW Aurora plant is underpinned by a 20-year
power supply contract with the South Australian government, but the
company is still to finalise a $110m concessional loan with the federal
government, the result of a deal with former senator Nick Xenophon in
return for his support for company tax cuts.
Dan Spencer worked on the solar thermal campaign as an activist with
the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and Solar Citizens, relocating
from Adelaide for six months to help build local support. Now a
campaigner with the Australian Services Union, he is still pinching
himself that it is set to become a reality. “The transition from coal
hasn’t been perfect, but in a couple of years we will be seeing this
incredible project that people not that long ago thought was just pie in
the sky,” he says. “The local community really deserves the credit.”
Aurora
is not the only solar-thermal project linked to the region. Port
Augusta is already home to a small concentrated solar-thermal plant
owned by Sundrop Farms that it uses to run a hydroponic greenhouse that
provides Coles with tomatoes.
Also on the horizon, and just as unique design-wise, is a proposal by
Solastor, chaired by former Liberal party leader John Hewson. It promises new
graphite-based technology
to capture solar energy and store it in a load-shifting battery. Hewson
says it will be a world-class project. “Solar thermal will take the
market, there’s no doubt about that,” he says.
Why are developers choosing the Upper Spencer Gulf? Investors say it
has several things going for it: great sunshine; a history of
electricity generation that left strong connections into the national
grid; nearby industry – particularly mine developments – demanding
reliable energy; strong facilitating support from the Weatherill Labor
government that has continued under the new Liberal premier, Steven
Marshall.
Ross Garnaut is a former Labor climate policy adviser who is now the president of
Zen Energy, a solar and battery firm that has projects in the region and is 51% owned by Gupta.
“The Upper Spencer Gulf happens to be a very good place to start,”
Garnaut says. “Some coal generation regions have good renewables and
others don’t, and no others have them as good as Port Augusta. [But] the
Port Augusta developments could be replicated in any region that has
good solar and wind resources.”
The inclusion of solar thermal is crucial as it means jobs on a
semi-industrial scale. Wind and solar photovoltaic plants bring plenty
of jobs in construction, but few in operation. Solar thermal has more in
common in operation with coal, using steam to spin a turbine.
SolarReserve expects to have a 50-strong permanent workforce at the
Aurora plant.
It is an important point. While enthusiasm about the new projects in
the gulf is high, the shift away from coal has not been seamless – less a
transition than a period of loss followed by rebirth. There remains
significant disappointment, in some cases anger, about what some
consider the unnecessary pain caused by a failure to plan for life after
coal.
 |
| ‘My advice is: learn
from the Port Augusta experience. I wish the federal government would,’
says Port Augusta mayor Sam Johnson. Photograph: Che Chorley for the
Guardian |
Gary Rowbottom is a case in point. A mechanical technical officer at
the town’s power stations for 17 years, he joined the Repower Port
Augusta campaign in 2012 and became the
public face of the campaign.
He was persuaded that solar thermal was the future and hopeful Alinta
would be persuaded to embrace the technology to replace coal. He says he
was naive about how easy that would be. When the company announced
Northern’s closure earlier than expected, he was 55 and left hunting for
work.
Fifty job applications and 11 interviews later, he was still looking.
After about 18 months he left town to take a position on a coal plant
in central Queensland. He now sees his wife, Debbie, only every couple
of months.
“It’s not been ideal,” he says. “I did my best to get a job that
would have kept me home. I guess it was hurting me financially, watching
my redundancy steadily getting eroded away, and I had a growing sense
of failure. I worry that others are going through the same thing.”
Rowbottom is buoyed by the developments under way at home, and
hopeful the Aurora solar thermal plant will provide his ticket back.
“It’s great it is happening. We just wish it could have happened a bit
sooner,” he says. “What is hard for many of us to understand is why the
closure couldn’t have been organised as a proper transition.”
Johnson, who ran unsuccessfully for Xenophon’s SA Best party at the
state election, says Port Augusta is set to be the renewable energy
capital of the country, with more ongoing jobs if all proposed projects
in the Upper Spencer Gulf go ahead than at the former coal plant.
But he says both the former Labor state and current Coalition federal
governments failed to offer the community the support it needed when
the coal plant closed. The ramifications of the rapid closure were
significant. Some small businesses and shut. Dirt and coal ash continue
to blanket Port Augusta when the wind blows from the south-east because
the former coal plant site was not properly rehabilitated. Wholesale
electricity prices across the state increased more than they would have
had more significant replacement generation been readied earlier.
“I’d love for people to learn from what’s happened here [about] what
not to do when you’re closing a power station,” Johnson says.
Whyalla
seems to have fewer issues in the wake of Gupta’s arrival in July 2017.
Seeing a business opportunity that governments and publicly listed
companies did not, he promised to initially spend $1bn to double the
steel mill’s production and convert it to a “green steel” model he has
applied in other countries. This includes using more recycled steel and
investing heavily in clean energy close to the plant. He is
spending $700m
building two farms of solar panels, a cogeneration plant to convert the
waste gases from steel production into electricity, the country’s
largest lithium-ion battery and up to three pumped hydro plants in
disused mining pits in the Middlebank Ranges. He says more will follow.
Both Gupta and Johnson say the message for the rest of the country is: embrace change.
Gupta says: “Be braver. Be more entrepreneurial. Take risks … It is
very difficult to change things in Australia. Everyone is too stuck in
their ways.”
Johnson says: “You can resist change as much as you like, but the
reality is, if you’re in a community that has a coal-fired power
station, its days are numbered. The market is dictating that change
whether we like it or not.
“My advice is: learn from the Port Augusta experience. I wish the federal government would.”
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