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Project overview
  • Lead Organisation

    Hydro-Electric Corporation

    Location

    Hobart, Tasmania

    ARENA Program

    Advancing Renewables Program

  • Start date

    28 August 2017

    End date

    31 January 2018

  • Project Partners
    None
    This pumped hydro project was completed on 31 January 2018.

Summary

The Battery of the Nation initiative is investigating and developing a pathway of future development opportunities for Tasmania to make a greater contribution to the National Energy Market.

With the support of ARENA funding, this concept study has developed a list of potential pumped hydro sites in Tasmania that represent over 4800 MW of pumped hydro storage capacity in Tasmania. These options will be the subject of pre-feasibility studies which will reduce the list to 2500 MW of pumped hydro potential.

How the project works

This concept study has reduced a list of over 2,000 potential pumped hydro options in Tasmania to 14. These options have been selected through high level technical assessment of project sites and rapid workshop assessments with a wide range of internal stakeholders from technical and scientific disciplines across the Hydro Tasmania group.

The selected options are those deemed most likely to meet key project and sustainable development objectives based on early stage analysis and will be further assessed as part of the next phase of study which is pre-feasibility. If further investigations show the selected sites do not meet these objectives, other alternative sites may be considered. The number of selected options will be reduced further during pre-feasibility studies to meet a target of 2500 MW combined installed capacity.

Benefit

This concept study has demonstrated that pumped hydro project opportunities in Tasmania which are likely to be technically and economically viable, could deliver an additional 2500 MW of storage capacity – more than doubling Tasmania’s current capacity.

Last updated 19 January 2021

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