The east-coast gas question, again: this time it’s winter 2028
AEMO’s most recent gas statement of opportunities puts the first material east-coast shortfall risk in the back half of this decade, assuming a cold winter lines up with low wind output in the southern states. That’s not a new sentence. It’s close to the same sentence AEMO published two years ago, and the one before […]
The Coalition’s nuclear plan: the cost and timeline questions
Seven sites. That’s the number that anchors this whole debate, and it hasn’t changed since the Coalition first named them: Liddell and Mount Piper in New South Wales, Loy Yang in Victoria, Callide and Tarong in Queensland, Northern in South Australia, and Muja in Western Australia. All are current or former coal plant locations. The […]
Nuclear versus firmed renewables: the cost maths again
Ninety seconds. That’s roughly how long it takes for someone at a public meeting on this topic to say the word “baseload” without defining it, and for someone else to say “firmed” without defining that either. I’ve sat through enough of these sessions, from a community hall in the Hunter to a webinar out of […]
What ‘firming’ means and why gas keeps coming up
EnergyAustralia’s Tallawarra B gas peaker, down near Lake Illawarra, is now into its second winter of proper dispatch, and the pattern repeats itself with almost boring regularity. It sits idle for weeks. Then a cold front parks itself over the southeast, wind generation across three states falls away at once, and for two or three […]
Eraring power station: how 2025 became 2027, and why
Drive the F3 past Dora Creek of a still morning and you can usually still pick the plume over Lake Macquarie. Eraring hasn’t stopped, and now it isn’t going to for a while yet. The short version: Australia’s biggest coal-fired power station, which Origin Energy once planned to shut in 2025, is now contracted to […]
Small modular reactors: the actual state of the technology
One SMR project in the world is currently pouring safety-related concrete. One was cancelled after its customers walked away over the price. Everything else, and there is a lot of everything else – is a design, a licence application, or a slide deck. That gap between the spruiking and the shovels is the whole story, […]
Green hydrogen: where it genuinely makes sense
Fortescue walked away from its Gibson Island green ammonia project in Queensland in 2024. Woodside shelved its H2Perth and H2TAS proposals around the same time. The South Australian government’s hydrogen power station near Whyalla, once the centrepiece of its Hydrogen Jobs Plan, was deferred when the costs came back higher than the business case could […]
Coal closures and the reliability debate, 2026 edition
Eraring was supposed to be gone by now. It isn’t, and the fact that it isn’t tells you most of what you need to know about where this debate has actually landed, as opposed to where the shouting suggests it’s landed. In brief, it is this: coal is leaving the National Electricity Market, the timetable […]
The east-coast gas supply question, again
Put briefly, it is this: the southern states are still short of gas from around the middle of this decade onward, the big new domestic sources everyone points to are either years away or stuck in a regulatory queue, and the LNG terminals at Gladstone keep pulling on the same pipeline network that Victoria and […]
Nuclear versus firmed renewables: the cost argument, again
Briefly, it is this: nobody serious disputes that a firmed renewables grid is cheaper to build over the next fifteen years, and nobody serious disputes that a paid-off nuclear fleet would be cheap to run over the fifteen years after that. The argument, every time, is about which fifteen years you’re standing in when you […]