<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/persistent-clustered-breakdowns-coal-clunkers-fail-the-grid-with-119-outages/>
"The fleet of remaining coal-fired power plants on Australia’s main grid
suffered a combined 119 breakdowns, or unscheduled outages, over the past six
months, new data has revealed, and were out of action for an average of 22 per
cent of that time.
The analysis from
Reliability Watch is its latest report using data submitted
to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) on the capacity coal plants
have available to the National Electricity Market (NEM) every five minutes.
The report shows that at the beginning of April, 2025, the 15 coal plants
spread across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria submitted 23 planned
maintenance shutdowns for the period until the end of September.
But instead of the 23 outages expected by AEMO, there were actually 142 outages
– including 119 breakdowns – over the six months.
All told, the coal plants were unavailable to meet their generation commitments
22 per cent of the time, the report says. This means an average of 4.7
gigawatts (GW) of electricity generation capacity was not available to the NEM
on any given day.
The data confirms what AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC),
CSIRO and the vast majority of the energy industry already know – but certain
state governments and federal politicians seem determined to deny:
“Coal-fired power stations are no longer capable of delivering reliable,
affordable electricity, even under favourable conditions,” says
Reliability
Watch.
And some of the worst offenders are in the states where governments have
committed public money to keep coal plants running past their use-by dates, or
are planning to."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
