The Tasmanian government has threatened to take legal action against the operators of a Bass Strait electricity cable that failed and contributed to an energy crisis in the state.
Energy Minister Guy Barnett said on Thursday the government believes it is entitled to damages over the Basslink outage in December 2015.
"The state proposes to initiate the dispute next week unless Basslink agrees to compensate it for its losses," he said in a statement.
At the end of last year, Basslink rejected an analysis[1] of its subsea cable outage of 2015-16 released by Hydro Tasmania[2] that said the subsea cable was pushed beyond its design limits.
"The DNV GL analysis indicates that the cable had been operated by BPL in a manner that allowed it to exceed its temperature design limits during a number of periods in its service life. This overheating and subsequent cooling of the cable has resulted in degradation of the cable," Hydro Tasmania said at the time.
"DNV GL concluded that the cable failure was the probable result of electrical energy discharge within the cable as a result of polarity reversal and cooling shortly before the 20 December 2015 cable failure."
Basslink retorted that the report merely put forward one idea and did not provide any "conclusive and definitive proof".
"Hydro Tasmania's experts did no actual testing on the Basslink cable or any similar HVDC [high-voltage direct current] cables. They used a theoretical model based on certain assumptions to come to a set of conclusions," Basslink CEO Malcolm Eccles said. "These assumptions make the experts' conclusions speculative and not based on actual facts."
The Basslink Interconnector was down between December 2015 and June