A couple of years ago the Australian Financial Review wrote that metal smelting in Australia had little future.
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The industry thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s, the AFR wrote, on the back of the cheap, subsidised coal power that state electricity bodies used to lure the industry to Australia to underwrite development.
The article came out in the same week as the public knowledge of the letter Glencore wrote to then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull saying soaring electricity prices had made its Mount Isa and Townsville copper processing plants marginal.
In Queensland alone the cost of power per megawatt hour had gone from $61.25 to $93.40 in two years.
A market analyst told the AFR in 2017 Australia could no longer compete because smelter investors are wary of carbon risk on long-lived plants and were gravitating towards low-cost geothermal and hydro electricity sources around the world while we persist with high carbon coal-fired power.
"Without substantial wind and solar development along with substantial storage we can not provide high volumes of low emission electricity needed around the clock to smelt ore. The economics of such renewable energy plus storage in this application are not yet competitive with low emission electricity in other countries," the analyst said.
Two years down the track little has changed to provide certainty in the power space.
Our federal government seems to lack the will to invest in large-scale solar and wind and there remains too much talk of "back to the future" new coal-fired plants that would need massive government subsidies to get off the ground.
It is in this environment that support for CopperString 2.0 has reignited with its possibilities of providing cheaper power to local mines via the national grid than is currently available through the two local power stations.
But as Mines Minister Dr Antony Lynham cautions, we really should be looking at more local solutions if someone has the guts and the money to back solar.
Sunshine is the one thing the North West has in abundance and it would be nice to see this powering the grid - Derek Barry