Dirty Yallourn Power Station to Close Early
One of Australia’s dirtiest coal-fired power stations, Yallourn in Victoria’s Latrobe valley, will close four years earlier than scheduled and be replaced, in part, by a grid-scale battery.
EnergyAustralia announced on Wednesday it would shut the 1970s-built, 1,480-megawatt brown coal plant in mid-2028.
There have been several outages at the ageing generator in recent years and a widespread expectation that at least one coal plant would shut early due to an influx of cheap renewable energy making them financially unviable.
The brown and black coal plants have faced heightened financial pressure in recent years as solar and wind have been built faster than most experts expected.
A recent analysis by two groups – Green Energy Markets and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa) – found that, between 2018 and 2025, new solar and wind plants would add about 70,000 gigawatt hours of clean supply each year.
This is equivalent to more than a third of the national grid’s usage. The result has been a slump in wholesale electricity prices, which has been good for consumers but not fossil fuel generators.