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, and since then the entire strategic story of this gentailer has been building toward that single morning when the boilers go cold in the Latrobe Valley.
What’s changed recently isn’t the date. It’s how thin the buffer looks now that the date is getting close.
Yallourn’s closing timeline and why 2028 keeps the lights on at all #
Yallourn is a brown coal plant on the old La Trobe Road corridor near Churchill in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, and it has been running since the 1970s in various forms. It supplies roughly a fifth of Victoria’s electricity on a normal day. EnergyAustralia’s current position, confirmed in its own closure notices to AEMO, has the plant retiring in 2028, a deadline the company has reaffirmed rather than walked back even as other generators around it have had their own closures slip. Eraring’s dates moved. Liddell came down earlier than some expected. Yallourn has, so far, stayed put on the calendar.
That consistency matters for planning purposes, and AEMO’s own Integrated System Plan treats the 2028 date as a planning input, not a guess. Our site has covered how thin the margin is around coal exits generally – see is Australia closing coal faster than it can replace it, and Yallourn sits near the pointy end of that argument. Victoria doesn’t have a lot of spare transmission headroom to bring in replacement capacity from elsewhere quickly, and the state’s own REZ rollout, much like NSW’s, is running behind the generation it’s meant to be catching up to.
Mount Piper’s second life as the company’s main earner #
While Yallourn gets the attention, Mount Piper in NSW is doing the heavier financial lifting for EnergyAustralia right now. It’s a black coal station near Lithgow, and it has become, almost by accident of timing, the company’s most reliable cash generator as the broader coal fleet around the NEM thins out. Mount Piper isn’t scheduled to close until well into the 2040s under current notices, giving EnergyAustralia a long tail of coal revenue even as Yallourn disappears from the ledger.
The honest read on Mount Piper is that it’s propping up the balance sheet during the transition years, not that it’s part of some long-term decarbonisation story. EnergyAustralia’s parent, CLP Group out of Hong Kong, has made public commitments around emissions reduction across its portfolio, but Mount Piper’s extended operating life shows how commercial reality and climate commitments can run on separate tracks for a long time before they actually meet.
Tallawarra B and the hydrogen promise that keeps shrinking #
Tallawarra B, on the shores of Lake Illawarra near Yallah in NSW, was pitched as the bridge technology. A 320-odd megawatt open-cycle gas peaker, designed from day one to be hydrogen-capable, it was meant to show that gentailers could firm the grid with gas while building a pathway to zero-carbon peaking fuel. It came online in 2025, and the gas-fired side of it works as advertised, dispatching into the NEM during peak demand windows.
The hydrogen side is where the story gets thinner. EnergyAustralia has always described the hydrogen blending capability as a future option rather than a committed program, and that’s proven to be the accurate framing. Green hydrogen at the volumes and reliability a peaker needs remains commercially unproven in Australia – we’ve covered why in green hydrogen: where it genuinely makes sense, and nothing about Tallawarra B’s early operating record suggests that’s about to change quickly. The honest version is that Tallawarra B is a gas peaker with a hydrogen option attached, not a hydrogen plant that happens to burn gas today. That distinction matters because it tells you where the actual capital went.
This is the bit I’d push back on if I were taking the generous reading some coverage gives it: calling Tallawarra B “hydrogen-ready” is true in the narrowest engineering sense and slightly misleading in the practical one. It’s ready the way a car with a spare tyre bolted to the roof is ready for a flat. Technically correct, not really the point.
The greenwashing settlement and what it actually cost #
EnergyAustralia found itself in Federal Court territory over claims made about its Go Neutral carbon offset product, with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission alleging the marketing overstated the environmental benefit of offsetting household electricity use through purchased carbon credits. The matter was resolved through a settlement rather than a contested finding of wrongdoing, with EnergyAustralia agreeing to a enforceable undertaking and contributing to a fund, alongside a public admission about aspects of the marketing claims. ASIC’s own release on the matter sits on the regulator’s site as the primary record of what was agreed.
Follow where the money actually landed and it’s a modest sum relative to EnergyAustralia’s total revenue base. The bigger cost was reputational, landing at exactly the moment the company needed credibility for its own transition story around Tallawarra B and its REZ-linked renewable contracts. Greenwashing settlements of this kind are becoming a live issue across the sector as more gentailers market “green” products to retail customers, and the Clean Energy Regulator’s own work on the integrity of Australian Carbon Credit Units has become more relevant reading for anyone assessing these claims going forward, via the Clean Energy Regulator’s published ACCU scheme material.
Where the renewables and storage pipeline actually stands #
EnergyAustralia has been building out a wind, solar and battery portfolio to sit alongside the coal and gas fleet, with battery storage projects at various stages of construction and early operation. The company doesn’t have the scale of battery ambition that a BlackRock-backed developer like Akaysha has – see our profile on Akaysha Energy: BlackRock’s big battery bet on the NEM – nor the sheer renewable generation volume AGL or Origin can point to. What it has is a portfolio sized to its own retail book, which is a smaller, more conservative approach than some competitors are taking.
That conservatism is, in my view, the right read on where EnergyAustralia actually sits in the gentailer pecking order. It’s not trying to out-build Origin or Alinta on renewables. It’s trying to keep its retail customer base supplied through a closure window that’s going to be tight regardless of what else gets built in Victoria over the next two years. For context on how that compares with the two biggest gentailers’ approaches, see AGL versus Origin: two gentailer strategies compared.
The retail side nobody talks about enough #
EnergyAustralia’s retail arm is large, several million customer accounts across electricity and gas, and that retail base is really the thing the whole generation strategy exists to protect. A gentailer’s generation assets matter mostly because they hedge the retail book against wholesale price spikes, and EnergyAustralia’s recent moves, Tallawarra B’s firming capacity, the battery additions, read less like a grand transition plan and more like defensive positioning to keep customer bills predictable through a volatile few years.
Wholesale prices in the NEM can swing hard around coal closures, something we’ve unpacked in why wholesale electricity prices swing so violently, and EnergyAustralia’s retail exposure is exactly why the Yallourn closure date has been treated with such discipline internally. Slip the date and you risk a supply gap nobody else is contracted to cover. Hold the date and you need the replacement firming actually built and tested before the last boiler trips off.
What the closing years actually look like #
Expect the next eighteen months to be a quiet, unglamorous run of commissioning milestones, battery connections, Tallawarra B availability data, maybe a further battery announcement to round out the Yallourn transition plan. None of it will generate headlines the way a hydrogen blending trial or a new offshore wind project might. That’s rather the point.
Not every company in this transition is trying to be the story. Some are just trying to get through the next closure date without a supply gap, a greenwashing headline, or a credit downgrade. On current form, EnergyAustralia looks like it’s managing to do exactly that, with Mount Piper quietly paying the bills while Yallourn counts down. Whether 2028 holds as firmly as the last few years suggest it will is the only question that actually matters here, and it’s one AEMO’s planners are watching as closely as EnergyAustralia’s own board.
– Marcus Wren, Editor