First sod turned on critical HVDC transmission project – a leap for Australia’s energy transition - Hitachi Energy

Construction has begun on an HVDC transmission project described as critical to Australia's energy transition. The project, backed by Hitachi Energy, is designed to move renewable power from generation zones to demand centres. No other details on capacity, route, timeline, cost or completion date are provided in the announcement.

Where this fits

This project exemplifies the transmission overbuild cost buried in renewable-grid economics. A renewables-only system requires not just solar and wind capacity, but a massive parallel investment in long-distance wiring to move weather-dependent output from where the sun and wind happen to blow to where people live and work. That transmission cost, lines, substations, land easements, losses, is real and material, but rarely appears in the headline megawatt-hour price that makes renewables look cheap. The grid backbone renewables require is expensive, slow to build, and belongs to the whole-system tally, not the per-unit cost of panels.

What it means

Australia is betting on a transmission infrastructure built to manage intermittency: more wires, more interconnection, more complexity. This is necessary only because the generation mix is weather-dependent. A firm generation fleet, whether gas, coal or nuclear, needs far less transmission overbuild. The project also signals reliance on foreign design and build (Hitachi is Japanese-owned), a pattern across Australia's energy infrastructure. Australia has no domestic HVDC supply chain, no sovereign capacity to repair or replace major grid assets, and no nuclear option to reduce that dependence. Each renewable project that moves ahead locks in years of reliance on imported technology and engineering for the firming and transmission systems that make it work.