Private owners net millions in sale of ageing coal-fired power station in NSW
New South Wales taxpayers will feel “rightly dudded” by the sale of an ageing coal-fired power station that likely netted the private owners hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, critics including the state opposition have said.
Delta Electricity said it sold the 1,320-megawatt Vales Point power station in the NSW Hunter region to Sev.en Global Investments, owned by Czech billionaire Pavel Tykač.
Delta Electricity did not disclose the size of the sale of the asset, which it had bought for just $1m from the state government in 2015. Media reported the buyer paid more than $200m for the plant, providing a fat return, topped up by $130m in dividends paid to Delta’s owners, Trevor St Baker and Brian Flannery, in the past three years alone.
St Baker said Delta continued to believe “around-the-clock dispatchable generation” remained necessary for the national electricity market “well into the future”. He implied the plant may extend beyond its expected closure in 2029.
“[T]here are opportunities to grow the business [and] this can be better accomplished in a portfolio with Sev.en’s other baseload-capable generation interests,” he said in a statement. “The sale will facilitate this growth as Sev.en has shown a commitment to the sector and an ambition to expand, both in Australia and globally.”
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Vales Point supplies about 11% of NSW’s power. Controversy over the price paid by Delta intensified in 2019 when Renew Economy reported the new owners had their rehabilitation liabilities capped at just $10m, leaving taxpayers to pick up potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in clean-up bills.
Sev.en in 2019 bought half of InterGen, a company that
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