Australia's state-owned utility Snowy Hydro has rejected recent media claims that drought in the region will force the company to shut down the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric power generation scheme in a matter of days or weeks.
In a press release, the company stated that it is confident that, even if the current drought continues, the Snowy Mountains Scheme will be able to at least meet its electricity and water commitments in winter 2007 and into summer 2008.
Terry Charlton, managing director of Snowy Hydro, said: Unfounded speculation that Snowy Hydro will need to shut down its generators if Snowy Scheme storages reach 9% of capacity is totally incorrect. In fact, we are operating our generating plant quite comfortably at around that water storage level now and can continue generating at even lower levels.
The company revealed that it has taken a number of measures to conserve water. These strategies include using over 600MW of a gas-fired generation plant in Victoria, Australia; recycling water through the company’s largest power station, Tumut 3; and a winter cloud seeding program to increase water inflows from increased snowfalls.
Mr Charlton said: The design of the Snowy Scheme allows us great flexibility in managing our water such as the recycling of water through Tumut 3 power station without losing the water in the scheme and the use of our gas-fired generation in Victoria to further enable conservation of water.