EUAA Submission: SA Energy Transformation – Riverlink RIT-T
Emily Wood | August 31, 2018
We have reviewed the Project Assessment Draft Report (PADR) and have consulted with other end user advocates who have been most useful in the preparation of this submission. We have also spoken to a number of our South Australian and New South Wales members, many of whom have not been consulted directly by either Electranet or Transgrid despite all of them being significant energy consumers in each jurisdiction.
We suggest this is an area of improvement for the next round of consultation and the EUAA would welcome the opportunity to be involved as facilitator.
A fundamental assumption of the PADR seems to rely on the NSW region being in a state of “oversupply”, especially with the type of asset required to provide “firming” of variable generation in both South Australia and those assumed to be developed in the Renewable Energy Zones (REZ’s) the project dissects. Yet according to the AEMO ISP, two NSW based coal fired assets in Liddell (in 2022) and Vales Point (2028) are assumed to retire removing some 3,320 MW of the type of dispatchable generation that is required in both NSW and SA.
While you can also assume that other “resources” enter the market, the current trend is for a majority of these to come from distributed generation sources that also have a level of variability. With the National Energy Guarantee now put into suspended animation and with it the Reliability Guarantee that could have played an important role of integrating variable generation and deployment more dispatchable resources, the unpredictability of the system is only set to get worse…
Download attachment to read full submission.