Transgrid's HumeLink Project: Unlocking Australia's renewable energy potential - Hitachi Energy

Transgrid is building HumeLink, a transmission line between the Murrumbidgee region in New South Wales and the Victoria-New South Wales border. The project, backed by Hitachi Energy, is framed as infrastructure to move renewable energy from renewable-rich regions to demand centres. No timeline, cost, or capacity figures are given in the statement.

Where this fits

HumeLink is a symptom of the transmission overbuild baked into a renewables-heavy grid. Because solar and wind are diffuse and weather-dependent, they require far more wiring per unit of firm capacity than coal or nuclear plants do. The project bears directly on whole-system cost: every kilometre of new transmission is a hidden cost of the renewable transition that headlines about solar cost-per-megawatt-hour do not capture. It also bears on reliability and sovereignty. Transmission assets are long-lived infrastructure; building them to move variable power rather than centralised, dispatchable generation means locking in weather dependence and gas firming for decades.

What it means

Australia is spending heavily on transmission to route power from wherever the sun and wind happen to blow rather than building firm generation where it is needed. This is not cost-free. The money spent on HumeLink cannot be spent on firming capacity, storage, or the long-range transmission a truly resilient grid requires. A nuclear plant, by contrast, produces power on demand from a single site and needs minimal transmission reach. The renewable transition is being engineered backwards: Australia is paying the cost of a firm grid's transmission network to deliver an unfirm supply, then burning gas to fill the gaps.