Four units, roughly 1,480 megawatts, and a date that’s been sitting on EnergyAustralia’s books since 2021: 2028. That’s when Yallourn, the brown-coal plant that’s burned Latrobe Valley lignite into electricity since the 1970s, is scheduled to shut for good. I drove past the Princes Freeway turnoff into Morwell a while back on the way to see family in Gippsland, and the cooling towers still look the way they’ve looked my whole working life, which is sort of the point of this piece. They won’t for much longer.
Agree on the units first, because this is a story people tend to argue about in vibes rather than megawatts. Yallourn is not a small plant. It’s roughly 20 per cent of Victoria’s generation capacity and has, for decades, been one of the cheapest sources of baseload power in the National Electricity Market, because Latrobe Valley brown coal is mined a few hundred metres from the boilers and never has to go anywhere. That’s also exactly why replacing it is harder than replacing a plant that imports fuel. There’s no supply chain to redirect. There’s just a hole where 1,480 megawatts used to be.
Why 2028 and not later #
EnergyAustralia brought the closure date forward from its original mid-2030s plan, announcing in 2021 that Yallourn would close in mid-2028 rather than run into the next decade. The company’s reasoning, laid out in its own statements at the time, was blunt: an ageing plant with four units built between 1973 and 1982 was becoming less reliable and more expensive to maintain, and the economics of running it hard into a market increasingly full of rooftop solar and wind were getting worse, not better. AEMO’s own reliability forecasting has flagged Yallourn’s ageing profile for several years running in the Electricity Statement of Opportunities, and unplanned outages at the plant have shown up in dispatch data often enough that nobody in the industry calls this a surprise.
The closure sits inside a broader pattern I’ve written about before – coal units leaving the NEM faster than most people clocked a few years ago, a trend I went through in more detail in Coal exits versus replacement builds: who’s actually ahead. Yallourn is one more name on a list that already includes Liddell, and will eventually include Eraring and Loy Yang, in one form or another. What makes Yallourn different is the fuel underneath it. Brown coal doesn’t export, doesn’t get shipped interstate, and the Latrobe Valley workforce doesn’t have an obvious next brown-coal job to walk into once the plant stops.
The battery EnergyAustralia is building to replace it #
The firming answer, so far as there is one, is the big battery EnergyAustralia has committed to building at the Yallourn site itself: a four-hour duration battery in the hundreds of megawatts, designed to use the existing grid connection the coal plant already has. That’s the unglamorous but genuinely sensible part of the plan: transmission connections are scarce and slow to build, as anyone who’s followed the VNI West saga knows, and reusing Yallourn’s existing feed into the grid saves years that a greenfield battery site further out wouldn’t get.
But reusing the wire doesn’t change the maths on duration. A four-hour battery, however large in megawatts, is not a brown-coal baseload replacement in any meaningful sense. It’s a firming asset, built to smooth peaks and cover the gaps that wind and solar leave, not to run around the clock the way Yallourn has for fifty years. I’ve gone through this mismatch before, in the piece on what ‘firming’ means and why gas keeps coming up, and Yallourn’s replacement plan is a clean example of the pattern: battery plus wind plus solar plus transmission, stitched together, is meant to do the job that one big thermal plant used to do by itself. It can work. It’s just a different kind of grid, with more moving parts and less margin for any one of them running late.
What else has to turn up on time #
The battery alone doesn’t replace Yallourn’s output. It needs the renewable generation behind it, wind and solar projects in Gippsland and across Victoria’s renewable energy zones, actually built and connected, and it needs transmission capacity to move that generation to where the load is. Victoria’s own state planning, under the Victorian government’s renewable energy zone framework, has pencilled in a chunk of this replacement coming from the Gippsland offshore wind zone, a project I covered in Gippsland offshore wind: the feasibility phase grinds on, and that one is still working through feasibility licences rather than turning steel. If that timeline slips much further past 2028, Victoria is looking at a gap, not a smooth handover.
AEMO’s Integrated System Plan: the document I went through in detail in what the AEMO Integrated System Plan actually says – treats Yallourn’s exit as a known input and models the replacement capacity needed across storage, wind, solar and transmission. The ISP’s own modelling has consistently shown Victoria needs more of all four delivered faster than the historical build rate, which is a polite way of saying the state has been behind schedule more often than not. I don’t think that’s unique to Victoria – NSW has the same problem with its own coal exits, something I’ve covered in NSW’s coal exit and the REZ rollout: a widening gap, but it does mean 2028 is less a settled date than a target EnergyAustralia and AEMO are both still working to hit.
The Latrobe Valley workforce question #
Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in a megawatt table. Yallourn directly employs several hundred workers, plus a larger number in the associated mine and contracting roles, in a region that has already absorbed the closure of Hazelwood in 2017 and watched the broader decline of Latrobe Valley’s coal workforce for two decades. The Victorian government set up the Latrobe Valley Authority after Hazelwood specifically to manage this kind of transition: retraining, local economic diversification, worker support payments, and EnergyAustralia has said it will apply lessons from that experience to Yallourn’s wind-down, including staggered redundancies tied to each unit’s closure date rather than one cliff-edge event.
That’s the sensible way to do it, and credit where it’s due. Hazelwood’s closure happened with five months’ notice and caused real disruption to Latrobe Valley households; Yallourn’s seven-year runway gives workers, contractors and the local council time that Hazelwood workers didn’t get. Whether seven years of runway actually produces seven years of useful retraining and new local jobs, rather than seven years of uncertainty followed by the same scramble, is the open question nobody can answer yet. I’d be careful about assuming announced funding automatically becomes outcomes on the ground in Morwell and Traralgon – regional transition funds have a patchy record nationally, and the Latrobe Valley Authority’s own progress reports are the place to check rather than press releases.
What this means for the rest of the grid #
Victoria doesn’t operate in isolation. It shares interconnectors with NSW and South Australia, and leans on Tasmania’s hydro through Basslink and, eventually, Marinus Link: a project I covered in Marinus Link: the cable Battery of the Nation can’t do without. If Victoria’s own replacement capacity for Yallourn runs late, the state will lean harder on imports during peak demand, which pushes risk onto interconnectors that already get stretched during heatwaves. AEMO’s reliability forecasts, published twice yearly in the Electricity Statement of Opportunities, are the document to watch for whether that risk is actually materialising or staying theoretical – worth checking AEMO’s own published ESOO rather than taking anyone’s summary of it on faith.
The other plant worth watching alongside Yallourn is Loy Yang, Victoria’s other brown-coal giant, because the two closures were never meant to happen in the same year but the state’s replacement build has to cope with both eventually. I’ve gone through that broader reliability argument in coal closures and the reliability debate nobody’s settled, and Yallourn is the nearer-term test case for whether the industry’s planning assumptions hold up against an actual closing date rather than a modelled one.
Where I land on this one #
My honest read, for what it’s worth after years of watching these dates slip and sometimes not slip, is that Yallourn’s 2028 closure itself is close to locked in – plant age and EnergyAustralia’s own public commitments make a reversal unlikely, barring a genuine reliability emergency AEMO would have to call. The bit I’m less confident about is whether the replacement capacity, particularly the Gippsland offshore wind and the broader transmission build Victoria needs, lands anywhere near on time. Batteries get built faster than wind farms and transmission lines, which is exactly why EnergyAustralia led with the battery announcement. It’s the right sequencing. It’s just not the whole answer, and nobody’s pretending otherwise if you read the ISP modelling rather than the press release.
Worth remembering, too, that the Latrobe Valley has been here before, with Hazelwood, and came through it: bruised, with a smaller workforce and some hard years in Morwell, but through. Whether Yallourn’s longer runway produces a genuinely better outcome, or just a longer wait for the same adjustment, is something I plan on checking back on well before 2028 arrives.
– Tom Fitzgerald, Baseload & Fuels Correspondent
Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash