Tasmania leads Australia in renewable energy as hydro assets power green economy ambitions

Tasmania's electricity system is powered 100 per cent by renewable energy in all but the driest years, a distinction no other Australian jurisdiction can claim, and the state government and Hydro Tasmania are pursuing an ambitious program to expand the island's renewable generation and storage capacity to make it a net exporter of clean energy to the mainland — the Battery of the Nation project that would make Tasmania's hydro assets the primary long-duration storage solution for the Australian electricity market.

Hydro Tasmania's existing portfolio of 30 power stations and more than 50 storage lakes represents the most significant concentration of dispatchable renewable generation in Australia, providing the flexibility to ramp generation up and down in response to market prices that wind and solar generation cannot match. This flexibility is increasingly valuable as the national electricity market integrates more variable renewable generation that needs dispatchable backup.

The Battery of the Nation program proposes to expand Hydro Tasmania's generation and pumped hydro storage capacity, and to connect it to the mainland through a second Basslink interconnector that would allow the bidirectional flow of energy that converts Tasmania's surplus hydro capacity into mainland battery storage and Tasmania's energy deficit periods into mainland export opportunity. The second Basslink's economics improve as the mainland's renewable integration need grows.

Green hydrogen is a natural extension of Tasmania's clean energy advantage, with several project developers including Origin Energy and Grange Resources assessing the economics of green hydrogen production using Tasmania's renewable electricity at competitive prices. The island's port infrastructure at Bell Bay and the established industrial base in the Derwent Valley provide the logistics and engineering capability that hydrogen production requires.

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