Another of Tasmania's major industrials has agreed to reduce its power usage to help Hydro Tasmania deal with the state's energy crisis.

Tasmania's fourth biggest power user Norske Skog will voluntarily reduce load at its Boyer Mill for one week, starting from the middle of next week.

One of the company's two paper machines and the associated pulp mill will be closed.

Tasmania is unable to import power across the Basslink undersea interconnector cable because of a fault causing a long-term outage.

The original repair date of March 19 has blown out and it is not known when the cable will be fixed.

The fault has coincided with record low storages in hydro dams.

The reduction of 43 megawatts at Boyer follows an agreement by Bell Bay Aluminium to reduce its power use by 10 per cent for up to five months.

No major effect on customers

The mill's general manager, Rod Bender, said his company had been in talks with Hydro Tasmania since early January.

He does not expect the measure to have a major impact on the business.

"The complexity for this is not internally, although shutting a paper machine off isn't necessarily straightforward, actually starting it up is the most difficult part," Mr Bender said.

"The difficulty is on the market side, so when we take orders from our customers for paper delivery, then obviously we like to meet those orders, to meet their requests for paper.

"So we're trying to make sure that there's enough flexibility in our forward ordering system that this downtime doesn't affect our customers."

Hydro Tasmania is shipping in 200 diesel generators over the next two months to ensure the state does not run out of power by winter, when it is hoped rain will boost Hydro dam water storages.

Dam levels are at 16.1 per cent and could drop as low as 13.6 per cent by May.

The gas-fired Tamar Valley Power Station has also been restarted to help make up shortfall.

Mr Bender said "worried" would be too strong a word when considering the year ahead in the context of the power crisis.

"Obviously we're watching with interest what happens," he said.

"A lot of it comes down to how much rain we get through this autumn and particularly winter period ... but I'm pretty comfortable with Hydro's positioning around bringing in the additional Tamar Valley capacity to the network, and then the diesel generators they've got as a backup."

 

Source: abc.net.au

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