EDL agreed both the commercial terms of financing for the project and shored up its power purchase agreement with Western Power on Monday. A consortium of ABN Amro, ANZ Investment Bank and National Australia Bank are putting up the funds.

The company has placed orders for the long lead items for the project such as the liquefied natural gas power plant, the LNG storage tanks and associated infrastructure.

The project, worth more than $600 million to EDL, involves the company building an LNG plant at Karratha and transporting the gas to the power stations it will build at Broome, Derby, Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek. The company will also build a diesel-fired unit at Looma.

Work on the first of the five power stations – at Broome – was to have started in October and been completed by December.

According to Western Power general manager regional Ken Bowron the Broome station will not be completed until March or April.

He said Western Power would continue to supply electricity to the five towns while the new stations are being built.

Western Power is losing about $20 million a year to supply power to the West Kimberley. The 20-year EDL deal is expected to cut the utilities losses in the region considerably.

No EDL spokesman could be reached for comment on the delays.

Broome residents appear to have taken the delay in their stride. The town has been relying on a modular generation set-up, not too dissimilar to the modular generators Western Power was deploying around Perth to shore up electricity supply last summer.

Broome shire president Graeme Campbell said as far as he was aware, the town had not suffered any generation-related problems this year.

Indeed, the largest threat to electricity supply in the region appears to be the flying foxes that roost, often with dire consequences to both themselves and power supply, on the transmission lines.

However, Campbell said he was still trying to have EDL build its power station on the eastern side of the tourism resort town.

He said that would provide a catalyst to move the rest of the town’s heavy industrial area away from its prime coastal location

Three state elections have been conducted since Western Power started the West Kimberley power procurement process.

Perhaps the best remembered part of the process was the exciting, yet ultimately futile, attempt to have a tidal power plant set up at Derby.

The then Liberal Government pulled the plug tidal power in favour of an LNG-fired option led by Maurice Brand’s Energy Equity in partnership with Woodside subsidiary Metasouce.

Brand’s project had problems raising finance and when the Gallop Government came to power the tidal project was brought back on the agenda.

But when the bid process was restarted the tidal power proponents failed to enter a bid and it became a two-horse race between EDL and the Avon Resources-backed Kimberley Power, another company led by Brand.

That process ended with Avon Energy accusing the government of mishandling the process, claiming EDL had dramatically lowered its price to come closer to that of Brand’s company.

Western Power strenuously denied those claims, saying the process had been open, competitive and supervised by a probity auditor.