Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.A hulking tower, 50 metres high, rises above Australia’s newest power station on the shores of Lake Illawarra. Since starting up in June, the turbine inside Tallawarra B has shown it can ramp to its maximum output in under 30 minutes and run for as long as it’s needed at any time of the day.
Deploying large-scale renewable energy generation and storage projects and more transmission lines to add them to the grid will be enough to get us most of the way to banishing coal from the grid. But not the whole way, warns the Australian Energy Market Operator in its 25-year transition road map, released last month.
Assuming each plant can generate about 0.5 gigawatts, approximately 26 plants would be needed. And if recent experience is anything to go by, this will be no small ask: EnergyAustralia’s Tallawarra B is the only peaking plant added to the NSW grid in the past decade, while just one more remains under construction at Kurri Kurri.
Neither the government nor the opposition has yet outlined concrete plans to tackle the gas problem, though. Dutton, meanwhile, has seized on the need to back up weather-reliant renewables to promote his campaign of adding seven nuclear generators to the grid from 2037. Experts, including the CSIRO, however, say such a timeline is overly ambitious, and warn turning to nuclear technology could lock Australia into the highest-cost form of electricity.
“But the plan advocates for flexible gas generation only – peaking power, not baseload – so we don’t waste our carbon budget on needlessly burning fossil fuels.”
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