Reeves Plains Power Station is a proposal from

Alinta Energy Alinta Energy is an Australian electricity generating and gas retailing private company owned by Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises (CTFE). It was sold for $4 billion and was approved Treasurer Scott Morrison in 2017. Alinta Energy has an ...

to build a gas-fired power station at Reeves Plains between

Gawler Gawler is the oldest country town on the Australian mainland in the state of South Australia. It was named after the second Governor (British Vice-Regal representative) of the colony of South Australia, George Gawler. It is about north of the ...

and Mallala in

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

. The proposed site borders both the Moomba-Adelaide gas pipe and an electricity transmission line. The power station is proposed to use six

gas turbine A gas turbine, also called a combustion turbine, is a type of continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas generator or core) and are, in the directi ...

s to produce up to of electricity. It is expected to be operated as a

peaking plant Peaking power plants, also known as peaker plants, and occasionally just "peakers", are power plants that generally run only when there is a high demand, known as peak demand, for electricity. Because they supply power only occasionally, the power ...

rather than running full time. The primary source of fuel will be the gas pipeline, however the plant will also be able to operate on

diesel Diesel may refer to: * Diesel engine, an internal combustion engine where ignition is caused by compression * Diesel fuel, a liquid fuel used in diesel engines * Diesel locomotive, a railway locomotive in which the prime mover is a diesel engin ...

fuel, and will have diesel storage on site. Stage 1 is expected to only be two or three of the turbines, generating 100 to 150 MW of electricity. The power station was originally expected to take 12 months to build, and be commissioned in January 2019. An extension of time request granted an additional 12 months in February 2019, but as of November 2019, the Alinta board had not yet decided to make the investment. Reevesplains2020power

History

Alinta Energy had previously operated the coal-fired power stations in South Australia known as Northern Power Station and the older Playford A and

Playford B Power Station Playford B Power Station was located at Port Paterson in the Australian state of South Australia about south of the city centre of Port Augusta. It was coal powered with four 60 MW steam turbines that generated a total of 240 MW of electrici ...

s, all near

Port Augusta Port Augusta is a small city in South Australia. Formerly a port, seaport, it is now a road traffic and Junction (rail), railway junction city mainly located on the east coast of the Spencer Gulf immediately south of the gulf's head and about ...

. It closed the last of these power stations in 2016, and since then had not been involved in generating electricity in South Australia. Both Alinta and the state government were widely criticised for closing the coal power stations when the state experienced a major blackout during a storm in September 2016. Ten years earlier, in March 2007, Flinders Power (now owned by Alinta Energy, and was the operating subsidiary for the Port Augusta power stations) had proposed to spend to build a 450MW gas-fired power station at Redbanks only one kilometre further north than the Reeves Plains proposal. However the Redbanks power station was never built. The development application for Reeves Plains was submitted on 12 October 2017 and opened for public comment on 8 November the same year. It received approval from

John Rau John Robert Rau SC (born 20 March 1959) is an Australian barrister and politician. He was the 12th Deputy Premier of South Australia from 2011 to 2018 and 48th Attorney-General of South Australia from 2010 to 2018 for the South Australian Bran ...

, the Minister for Planning on 16 February 2018, the last day the government could make major decisions before the state election. Alinta had not yet completed its internal investment case and received approval from its board to proceed to construction. In September 2018, Alinta chief executive Jeff Dimery said that it had failed to get enough support from customers to reduce the investment risk of building the power station. The project was one of 12 projects shortlisted in March 2019 from 66 registrations of interest in the Australian Government's Underwriting New Generation Investments program.

References

Natural gas-fired power stations in South Australia {{SouthAustralia-struct-stub