23 May 2024
The pleasure has been meeting the people who make Hydro Tasmania work. This may sound like easy praise, but I’ve greatly enjoyed seeing and hearing first-hand the commitment, competence and sincerity displayed by our people across the many sites I have visited.
The revelation has been the sophistication of Tasmania’s hydropower system and how it is managed – the maintenance and operation of our physical assets, the complex trading of energy, our community contributions to irrigation, recreation and drinking water, and our environmental stewardship through the management of lake levels and river flows.
The challenge is for Hydro Tasmania to help the State grow its economy and become a cornerstone of the national transition to clean energy. Tasmania will contribute to - and benefit from - that transition.
Hydro Tasmania is unusual, perhaps unique. The vision and skill of many leaders and workers over many decades built a system that is highly distributed yet tightly interconnected, and powers the State with negligible carbon emissions.
Before decarbonisation was a word, hydropower became environmentally contentious, as we remember from the cancellation of the Gordon-below-Franklin dam project. Climate change began to attract attention in the 1990s but was overshadowed by micro-economic reforms that split up power monopolies and introduced competition and privatisation.
The environmental credentials of hydropower have risen since the renewable rollout began. Hydro Tasmania’s system puts the State in the enviable position of attracting new wind and solar developments to meet growth in demand, without also having to compensate for the closure of coal-fired power. We provide the deep storage that is crucial to balancing increasing wind and solar power and is such a scarce commodity in most power systems.
The fact that Hydro Tasmania’s generation was not split into competing companies, and we remain publicly owned – together with the network companies that will take our output to customers – should make it easier to coordinate the growth of transmission and generation than in privatised and more fragmented systems. It may also increase public support because our core purpose and profits directly benefit the Tasmanian people.
Indeed, the generally high regard that Tasmanians have towards ‘the Hydro’ is another revelation to me.
Image: Richard pictured with the Hydro Tasmania CEO and Board of Directors. L-R Ian Brooksbank, Helen Galloway, Carlo Botto, Richard Bolt, David Middleton and Selena Lightfoot.
For all our advantages, the energy transition is still a major challenge.
We will have to develop projects that are larger than we have done for decades. For projects that proceed, finance will have to be attracted at a level similar to the value of our current assets. We will need to coordinate our projects with the development of transmission and renewable generation by others. We will need to gain the confidence of the community, Parliament and Government that any projects we commit to have been carefully planned and evaluated.
Recent planning approvals here and elsewhere show that social and environmental costs are sometimes assessed as outweighing the benefits of clean energy developments. We will need to be skilled in understanding and navigating that risk and to continue our engagement with communities, listening carefully to their hopes and concerns, and finding ways to address them.
We will also need to negotiate effectively with four major industries whose contracts cover more than half our output and will expire by 2030. Some of those will seek more supply to electrify or grow their production, and potential new industries will also ask for long-term contracts to underpin their proposed investments.
Some threshold decisions will need to be made as Ian Brooksbank leaves the CEO’s role in October this year. Ian’s steady and inclusive leadership has been a great asset to the organisation, and it will be important to maintain stability and cooperation through this internal transition.
And as we embark on an exciting new era, we must keep our eye firmly on the ‘business as usual’ ball so that we keep managing our existing operations to a high standard.
We are a strong organisation facing exciting and challenging times. I am pleased to be at the helm of Hydro Tasmania, working with our people to build that future.
Richard Bolt
As the Australian-born son of Dutch immigrants, I grew up across South Australia and the Northern Territory, from Adelaide to Darwin to tiny Warramboo and even Tarcoola, which is now a Nullarbor ghost town.
After high school, at the tender age of 16, I moved to Whyalla to start my electrical engineering degree and work in protective gear on crews that maintained electrical systems at BHP’s steelworks. I finished my degree in Adelaide while working summer breaks at Mitsubishi’s car plant, helping to semi-automate its production.
After graduating, I moved to Melbourne to help Victoria’s State Electricity Commission (SEC) upgrade its transmission control system but was soon drawn into public advocacy as the nuclear arms race was intensifying. This urge is in the family back to my paternal grandfather, a church curator who argued for social equity and hid weapons for the Dutch Resistance. I then joined a crossbench Senate party as a policy researcher. This led me to read up on climate science and start thinking about the energy transition.
Eventually I left the Canberra circle for the Victorian public service, to pursue my interest in energy while spending less time away from my wife and four growing children. That led to twelve years as Secretary of three departments, covering at various times agriculture, mining, forestry, education, transport and economic development.
Energy remains my longest career thread, and has involved lead roles in redesigning NEM governance, regulating and deregulating prices, overseeing supply security, and designing decarbonisation schemes. I have also led responses to drought, flood and fire, the mobilisation of a large transport build, negotiation of a major schools funding agreement, and exposure of corruption.
I left executive roles in 2018 to become a consultant, adviser and director, working on offshore wind policy, the Net Zero Australia study, NSW’s renewable rollout, and a clean hydrogen supply chain from Victoria to Japan. Much of my time is now spent in governance, which made the opportunity to chair the Hydro Tasmania Board the right role at the right time.
I don’t claim to be a local but have many touchpoints with Tasmania. The first Senator I worked for (Norm Sanders) represented this State. I worked with Tasmanian Secretary Kim Evans on Commonwealth-State matters. I’ve holidayed in Tasmania to enjoy the beautiful natural environment, most recently on Maria Island. I even proposed to my wife on an east coast beach.
Image: Hydro Tasmania CEO Ian Brooksbank and Board Chair Richard Bolt at Cethana dam, the site of our proposed first pumped hydro project.
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