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 […]
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. The short version is this: coal is leaving the National Electricity Market, the timetable […]
The east-coast gas supply question, again
The short version 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
The short version 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 […]
Santos: Moomba’s carbon bet and the Narrabri gas standoff
The short version: Santos runs one of the biggest carbon capture projects on the planet in a paddock outside Innamincka, has spent the better part of a decade trying to get a gas field in northern New South Wales into production, and keeps turning up in every conversation about why the east coast might run […]
The Coalition’s nuclear plan: cost and timeline questions
Seven sites. Eleven gigawatts. Operational by the early 2040s. Those are the headline numbers from the Coalition’s nuclear policy, which was taken to the 2025 federal election and lost — but which Peter Dutton’s successor has since indicated the party intends to prosecute as a long-term alternative energy vision. The policy didn’t win government, but […]
The Role of Fossil Fuels and Renewables in Australia
Australia’s energy system and economy have been tied to fossil fuels for decades. Renewable energy has also played a growing role. Renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydro have been increasingly integrated into Australia’s energy mix. For decades, coal, oil and LNG powered the nation’s industries and were exported. Fossil Fuels are a reliable and cost-effective […]