Albany wave power plan attracts interest from Carnegie Wave amid WA election
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Clean energy company Carnegie Wave has confirmed it is interested in developing WA Labor's proposal for a wave power farm in Albany, in Western Australia's Great Southern.
WA Premier Colin Barnett recently questioned Carnegie's intentions, amid speculation Labor had pitched a plan the company was not interested in purely because it could be a vote winner.
"I'd suggest you ask Carnegie, the company involved, what they wish to do. Has anyone bothered to do that?" Mr Barnett said on last week.
However, the company has now released a statement confirming it saw Labor's $19.5 million commitment to wave power in Albany as a good opportunity.
"The project will be the first commercial-scale wave farm in Australia and will demonstrate the potential for WA and Australia to tap into a highly consistent renewable resource," Carnegie's managing director Michael Ottaviano said.
"[It will deliver] 24/7 clean power into the electrical grid at a time where recognition of the importance of reliable, clean energy in Australia has never been higher.
"The project, to be delivered in stages, will involve an initial 1 megawatt unit, followed by a 20MW wave farm, resulting in over $100m of local investment.
"Successful demonstration of the 20MW farm could in turn lead to a 100MW expansion."
Labor pitched the proposal as part of an election promise to spend $19.5 million on renewable projects in Albany.
The party wants the city to eventually be 100 per cent powered by renewables.
Energy supply threat must be addressed
But it prompted an immediate warning from the Grattan Institute, with the think tank saying the recent blackouts in South Australia underlined the need to tread carefully with such projects.
"There's not much doubt that one of the things that's been difficult in South Australia is we haven't managed the integration of a very large proportion of supply coming from wind very well at all," the institute's energy program director Tony Wood said.
"There's a lesson for everybody — [for] consumers, suppliers, governments, regulators et cetera — that we have to do a damn sight better job if we're going to transition to a lower-emissions energy future.
"So, for example, if you're moving away from diesel towards solar or wind, or in this case we're talking about wave technology, we need to understand how that technology works, what its characteristics are, and how we can actually manage it to make sure that there are no threats to security or even affordability of supply."
Topics: tidal-energy, energy, elections, states-and-territories, albany-6330, perth-6000, wa
