Hope cloud seeding will lift storages levels Hydro Tasmania says this year's cloud seeding program is extremely important, as Hydro dam storage levels across the state are down to 21 per cent of capacity.

The program begins today at a cost of about $1.3 million and will concentrate on Hydro catchment areas.  Hydro Tasmania spokesman Dr Michael Connarty says the program will lift the state's energy stocks by 20 megawatts.  He says Great Lake, Hydro's most important, is down to 13 per cent and has fallen by 11 per cent over the past year.  Dr Connarty says cloud seeding is very cost-effective.  "We estimate that it gives us about a 3:1 benefit cost ratio, so we generally spend about just over $1 million a year," he said.  "We estimate that we'll get about $3 million worth of benefit into our system and that's derived through the fact that we get more water in our storages and we use through our storages to generate electricity."

Dr Connarty says rainfall has been so low that all options to meet energy demand are playing an important role.  "Some storages have been the actual driest so therefore that has put a lot of pressure on the whole system as a whole," he said.  "Actually Basslink has been an excellent importer that has helped us manage those storages to a better extent, without it we would have been a lot lower and in a much more dire state." 

Disrupting activities                                                     
But the cloud seeding program has been met with a hostile reaction from the Mayor of West Coast.  Mayor Darryl Gerrity says the cloud seeding increases rainfall in the populated areas of the west coast. He says many activities are either disrupted or they have to be called off.  "They don't care about our Easter, they don't care about our tourism industry, they don't care about our school holidays coming up," he said.  "They don't care that we don't have any indoor arenas in which to play    
sport and it's recognised that most of our recreational activities are outdoors."

Dr Connarty says the program tries to only target catchment areas.  "Some of those are on the west coast but some are also in the Central Highlands and south-west of the state," he said.  "We have looked at the various science of cloud seeding when we did a 20-to30-year trial to make sure that we were getting it right to make sure that we would only make it rain in our catchments."

Source:  ABC Online