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Basslink has denied claims by the Tasmanian Government that it had breached warranties about the design and construction of the Basslink Interconnector and reiterated that the failure was a force majeure event.
The government last week demanded that the company pay $100 million in damages for the six-month outage from December 2015 onwards.
Charges have been flung back and forth over the outage. In December 2017, Basslink chief executive Malcolm Eccles denied a claim by Hydro Tasmania that blamed the outage on Basslink exceeding its design limit.
Basslink, which manages the data and power cable that links Tasmania to the Australian mainland, said it understood that the government's allegations stemmed from the DNV GL reports commissioned by lawyers for Hydro Tasmania, which were provided to Basslink in December last year.
{loadposition sam08}"As Basslink has previously noted, DNV GL did not conduct any testing of the Basslink Interconnector's cable and their reports were solely based on theoretical modelling," a statement said.
Hydro Tasmania had commissioned a power cable failure expert and a thermal modelling expert from international engineering consultancy DNV GL, which is recognised as the global leader in this field, to carry out its investigation.
But Basslink said: "The modelling used for the reports has not been shared with Basslink despite repeated requests to Hydro Tasmania. Without that information, it is difficult for Basslink to respond to these reports."
"Basslink stands by the independent investigation that was undertaken by CCI, who concluded the actual root cause of the cable failure in December 2015 as 'cause unknown'," the company statement said.
