CONSTRUCTION has started on a $75 million green power station at the Tableland Mill, part of miller MSF Sugar’s plan to make sugar cane more valuable.
MSF told a group of Tableland cane growers that site works have begun, and the company has already spent $12 million on equipment for the co-generation station, which will be about the same size as the existing mill.
The station will turn bagasse – a renewable sugar cane fibre – into electricity, with the station’s energy efficiencies more than tripling the amount of electricity able to be produced from the same amount of bagasse.
“When we burn the bagasse we will get 88 per cent of the energy back and turn that into electricity,” MSF general manager business development Hywel Cook said.
“At the moment we are only getting 40 pc.
“We currently make 7 megawatts and this will make 24 megawatts out of the same amount of bagasse.”
Mr Cook said the station was a “positive solution” to green power without the negative impacts of wind and solar.
“This is turning sunlight into electricity via sugar cane and its purely 100 pc green,” Mr Cook said.
“This is equivalent to making wind or solar except you can run this 24 hours a day.”
Mr Cook said MSF Sugar had signed a contract with Ergon Energy which will buy the electricity generated.
He said the station would be like a large micro-grid and would be able to supply the township of Mareeba in isolation to the electricity network.
“We will generate 100,000 megawatts of electricity which is enough to run the whole town of Mareeba,” Mr Cook said.
Mr Cook said the power station was part of the company’s vision to increase the value of sugar cane.
“We can’t survive long-term into the future, both of us, if we only get money by selling sugar,” Mr Cook said.
“We have to change from a sugar business to a sugar cane business.
“My long-term goal is to get more money into your pocket per hectare of cane that you grow.”
Mr Cook said ultimately, this could see a sugar mill, power station and fermentation plant, operating on the site.
He said the company was looking at alternative crops it could grow under dryland cropping, that could be processed at the mill in the off season.
“We want to move from just making raw sugar,” Mr Cook said.
“The next step is a power station and finally making bioplastics, chemicals or high value fuels.
“We have to get up there because at the moment we are only using half of the value of the sugar, the rest of it we throw away.”
Mr Cook said good cane supply, a highly energy efficient sugar mill and certainty in government policy provided the impetus for the project.
“The sugar we make from the Tableland is the best in the state and we have the most reliable and most modern mill in Australia, and probably the world,” Mr Cook said.
“This gives us confidence to keep investing in this region.”