(Bloomberg) -- AGL Energy Ltd.'s Barker Inlet power plant began operations Monday, Australia's first major new fossil-fuel power station since 2012, with its quick-start capability designed to back-up fast-growing wind and solar generation.
The A$295 million ($204 million) facility in South Australia has 210 megawatts of capacity and will help supplement renewables, which regularly meet more than 50% of the state's power demand, the company said in a statement. The plant is capable of reaching full capacity within 5 minutes, AGL said.
“This is important, because it will allow us to provide a rapid response to changes in renewable generation supply and demand -- particularly wind generation here in South Australia,” Chief Executive Officer Brett Redman said in the statement. Barker Inlet is part of AGL's A$2 billion pipeline of infrastructure projects aimed at bolstering the grid.
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Australia will likely need around A$400 billion in new utility-scale generation assets over the next 30 years as aging coal-fired power plants retire, the Grattan Institute, a think tank, said in a study last month. However, the industry has complained that the lack of policy certainty at a national level is hampering investment.
The government has short-listed 12 projects under a program to underwrite investment in new generation, and is also giving financial backing to the A$5 billion-plus Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project that will provide large-scale energy storage to back-up renewables.
In 2017, the South Australia state government installed diesel generators with a capacity of 276 megawatts as an emergency measure to help shore up the grid after storm damage to transmission lines caused widespread blackouts in September 2016. Those generators have since been sold to private operators.
To contact the reporter on this story: James Thornhill in Sydney at jthornhill3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ramsey Al-Rikabi at ralrikabi@bloomberg.net, Edward Johnson
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