Large employers in South Australia are faced with another week of power blackouts following last week's storm, with power restored to only parts of the state.
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Arrium, BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam mine, and Oz Minerals' mine at Prominent Hill are all experiencing extensive disruptions. Some have access to limited back-up power generation, although in all cases, output is being hampered.
Arrium is believed to have sufficient energy to keep its blast furnace alight, while operations at Olympic Dam remain suspended. The mine camp is receiving small amounts of power but it is insufficient to restart operations.
ElectraNet, which operates the high-voltage power network has advised that it may have one of the three damaged circuits back up and running late next weekend, with a second link to follow a few days later.
A spokesman for Arrium said the steel maker is producing around 2800 tonnes of iron a day, short of the usual output of around 3400 tonnes a day but as it is unable to convert it into steel, the material is being dumped, with the power outage costing the group around $30 million a week. Limited iron ore mining is underway to service export contracts.
It does not expect to have full power restored until Tuesday, next week, the spokesman said.
While the extended outage has triggered calls for the South Australian government to expedite a possible link between the South Australian and NSW power grids, a lobby group of power generators is opposing the idea.
"Increased interconnection should be part of a considered national energy strategy, not a political response to a major blackout," Matthew Warren of the Australian Energy Council said.
"These are 50-year assets that have material impacts on generation at both ends of the interconnector. The risk is they increase costs without solving, or indeed undermining, the system security problem they were meant to solve."
South Australia has two links with Victoria, with the larger Heywood link in the process of being upgraded. Earlier plans to connect with NSW were blocked after lengthy litigation.
Olympic Dam operations were on "care and maintenance", BHP said, while power was restored to the nearby town of Roxby Downs township on Friday night.
"Olympic Dam is now receiving some power from the grid and with the additional generation capacity sourced and connected, this will ensure asset stability and integrity of the operation until full power is restored and operations can resume as normal," it said in a statement.
At Prominent Hill, the open cut mine is operating normally, with only limited operations underground. The processing plant was on standby, with maintenance programs brought forward, Oz Minerals said.
"On-site generators are continuing to provide limited power with some additional capacity being put in place to assist with underground production. The company is reviewing other options around larger generation capacity," it said.
"Based on the indicative time frame provided ... Oz Minerals expects its copper production to remain within annual guidance. However, gold production will be within or below the lower end of guidance," it said in a statement on Monday.
Earlier, the company gave production guidance at Prominent Hill of 115,000 to 125,000 tonnes of copper and 125,000 to 135,000 ounces of gold.
