Page 2936 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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Over the last five years, there have been a number of occasions on which concerns have been raised about our susceptibility to electricity shortages or outages. These actually were very much a concern that arose, in the first instance, over vulnerability to attack by terrorists and, secondly, vulnerability that was a consequence of an event such as the bushfires. Through those particular events, consideration has previously been given to the possibility of constructing and operating a gas-fired power station in the Australian Capital Territory.
Previous work that was done to the preliminary assessment stage by ActewAGL actually led to the conclusion that the construction would not be economically feasible. The cost-benefit analysis that was undertaken at the time actually did not prove up the construction and the operation; the return simply would not have been there in terms of the size of the power station that we might develop and the electricity that might be generated from it.
The significant difference in relation to a reassessment of the viability of a gas-fired power station, of course, is the prospect presented by the collocation of the data centre, following on, I should say, from work that ActewAGL had done to actually secure electricity for the ACT by the construction of an additional line through Williamsdale into the ACT, to give us two major lines of electricity into the territory. The new assessment and a new consideration of the feasibility of a gas-fired power station is that in this instance it has been linked, through the development of a partnership with a number of leading national and international companies, with a data centre.
The collocation and the security provided by a gas-fired power station for the operation of a data centre would be quite significant. So essentially these twin projects—the potential development of the gas-fired power station with a collocated data centre—changed the dynamic or the potential costs and benefits that might be achieved both in the construction of a gas-fired power station and in the construction and operation of a data centre.
It would be a project of enormous importance to the territory in the context of widening the industry base, the economic base. It is a billion dollar project or just thereunder. It would actually generate of the order of 600 jobs and a continuing economic impact of the order of $600 million a year, as well as enhancing our capacity to generate some power—not just to operate the data centre, which is very power intensive, but, of course, to allow for some excess power to be actually filtered into the ACT and the network here for domestic use. So it would give us significant security of supply.
Some of the other effects, of course, would be to enhance, indeed, the capacity for gas into the territory. The current capacity of the gas supply would have to be enhanced. There are a whole range of knock-on effects in terms of just the infrastructure, let alone some of the continuing or knock-on effects in relation to the encouragement of industry that would be spawned by a major gas-fired power station and a data centre.
ActewAGL is now working within Australia and, indeed, overseas on developing partnerships and is seeking to assess interest and trying to determine the extent to
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