NSW’s coal exit is outrunning its REZ build
Four coal units at Eraring, two at Bayswater, two more at Vales Point. That’s roughly 8,000 megawatts of dispatchable capacity sitting in NSW that the state’s own roadmap assumed would be gone or going by the early 2030s. Some of it already should have been. Origin Energy’s attempt to close Eraring in 2025 got pushed […]
Public versus private ownership of generation: who builds it better
$2.4 billion. That’s roughly what Queensland’s state-owned Stanwell and CleanCo have between them committed to pumped hydro and firming capacity through the Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan, money raised against the state’s own balance sheet rather than a private sponsor’s. Meanwhile Akaysha Energy, backed by BlackRock’s infrastructure arm, has been building battery capacity across three […]
EnergyAustralia: the gentailer counting down to Yallourn’s exit
1,480 megawatts. That’s the hole in Victoria’s supply that opens up when Yallourn shuts in mid-2028, and it’s EnergyAustralia’s problem more than anyone else’s, because EnergyAustralia owns the plant. The company has known the date for years. It locked it in publicly back in 2021, trading an earlier flagged closure for a firmer, later one, […]
Who really pays for the transmission build-out
AEMO’s most recent Integrated System Plan pencils in something north of $20 billion of new transmission by 2050, and that number has already moved twice since the 2022 plan was signed off. Every time it moves, it moves up. The transmission build-out cost is the least discussed big number in the entire energy transition, and […]
Victoria’s SEC revival meets its offshore wind test
A billion dollars of taxpayer equity now sits inside a government-owned energy company headquartered on Commercial Road in Morwell, in the middle of the Latrobe Valley’s coal country. That’s the State Electricity Commission, relaunched by the Andrews government in 2022 after roughly three decades in the wilderness following the Kennett-era privatisations of the 1990s. It’s […]
AGL versus Origin: two gentailer strategies compared
Origin Energy’s market capitalisation sits comfortably past $15 billion. AGL’s has spent most of the past two years struggling to hold above $10 billion. That gap is the whole story, if you’re in a hurry. It tells you which of the country’s two big listed gentailers the market thinks has the better balance sheet under […]
Why wholesale electricity prices swing so violently
South Australia’s spot price sat at the market price cap for a chunk of a hot Tuesday afternoon last month, then dropped below zero before most people had switched the oven on for dinner. Same grid, same day, same set of generators. A swing of roughly $18,000 a megawatt-hour inside twelve hours. Nobody at AEMO […]
Rooftop solar grid stability: the honest read
Twenty-four gigawatts. That’s roughly where Australia’s rooftop solar fleet sits now, spread across more than four million homes and small businesses, according to the Clean Energy Regulator’s small-scale scheme data. It is bigger than the entire coal fleet still running in the NEM. And on a mild, sunny Sunday in South Australia, it can supply […]
The Safeguard Mechanism: who’s really carrying the cost
215 facilities. That’s the current population of the Safeguard Mechanism, the scheme that’s supposed to be the sharp end of Australia’s industrial decarbonisation. Steelworks, cement kilns, LNG trains, alumina refineries, coal mines with big fugitive emissions. Between them they account for something like a third of the country’s total emissions, and the mechanism is meant […]
Has the Australian gas industry been written off too early?
Santos paid a dividend again this year off Cooper Basin and Moomba gas that most of the transition commentary insists is a stranded asset waiting to happen. Origin and AGL are still burning gas peakers at a profit on cold mornings and hot nights when the wind drops out. And AEMO’s own Gas Statement of […]