Emergency diesel generators purchased by the previous Labor government will be leased to the private sector, and there is already strong interest from “several companies”, says the energy minister.
“We don’t want them sitting idle,” Minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan told FIVEAA on Wednesday.
“$610 million dollars for diesel generators that have never ever been used. That is more money than was spent to build the Adelaide Oval and these generators have never been used.
“We want to actually get them into operation in the market so that they can have additional supply in the market, and that will push prices down, as well as still being available for emergencies.”
He said he had already received “quite a lot” of interest from businesses enquiring about the generators.
“Over the last six months we’ve had a lot of approaches, to be quite honest, from organisations keen to know what our intentions were.
“We didn’t tell them what our intentions were because we needed to wait until we got this report and some other information. But we’ve had several approaches from companies expressing their interest.
“Keep in mind that there nine of these generators in two different locations, so it’s not automatically as simple as they all get leased out to one company. There’s a range of different ways this could land but we’ve had no shortage of interest.”
