By PHILIP HOPKINS
ENERGYAustralia Managing Director, Mark Collette, has urged the states to set up government-backed strategic reserves of coal power that can be called on to avoid blackouts, as the development of firmed renewables lags and the closure of coal plants speeds up, the Australian Financial Review has reported.
Mr Collette said the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) draft blueprint for the power grid, released before Christmas, showed Australia’s energy transition was “happening at light speed”. Without back-up of coal power, the electricity system “holds too much risk for consumers”, he said.
The AFR reported that there was no proposal for a reserve system, but Mr Collette has outlined expectations for policy to evolve to support such a system, given the need for coal power beyond the dates plants would close on economic grounds. Yallourn power station, owned by EnergyAustralia, is due to close in 2028 and Loy Yang A in 2035, but Loy Yang B’s formal closure date is 2047.
Mr Collette said the scale of the transformation needed to hit Australia’s 2030 climate targets was “hard to overstate”.
“The timeline for coal exits highlights that getting the details right for the Commonwealth-state agreement on a strategic reserve for each state is essential,” he said.
AEMO said Australia needed to double its roll-out of new transmission lines by the end of the decade or risk the reliability of the grid, with the expected exit of the network’s coal-fired fleet by 2038, five years earlier than previously planned. This included Loy Yang B power station.
The Australian newspaper said failure to win the support of farming communities and invest well ahead of when infrastructure was needed – rather than a ‘just in time’ strategy and hope that new generation and transmission infrastructure are ready when coal power stations are retired – posed a major risk to the stability of the nation’s power systems, AEMO reported.
To meet renewable energy targets, the planned extension of transmission networks will need to double to about 5000km in the next 10 years, AEMO said. To replace coal generation, four to six gigawatts of renewable energy needs to be added to the market each year through to 2030.
The AEMO report was released after the COP28 climate and energy conference in Dubai, where the federal Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, backed a deal that for the first time called on nations to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
“Our global future is in renewable energy,” Mr Bowen said.
The Australian reported that the Opposition spokesman for climate change and energy, Ted O’Brien, said the COP28’s final communique named fossil fuels, but “it promotes carbon, capture and storage as an abating technology for such fuels along with nuclear energy, which can be a zero emissions substitute”.
