Whilst preparing this morning’s article about Callide C3, what also jumped out at me was the very visible dip in NEM-wide aggregate scheduled-to-be-available coal capacity that starts with the scheduled closure of Origin Energy’s Eraring coal-fired station in NSW, but is more complicated than just that:
Again, this comes from the ‘MT PASA DUID Availability’ widget in ez2view and highlights a couple things:
1) The step change down in capacity currently scheduled from 19th August 2025 (at the tail end of winter 2025) with all 4 units coming off at the same time*
* I’d expect a more nuanced plan to emerge well in advance of that date (e.g. perhaps staggered a month apart – and perhaps after winter’s over).
2) However that drop (2,880MW across 4 units) is only part of the story … we see this shortly followed by a pronounced ‘outage season’ for some of the remaining coal units:
(a) The low point (12,860MW on 26th September 2025) really stands out:
i. it would be only 54% of the current aggregate Maximum Capacity of all the coal units currently registered in the NEM (23,918MW)
ii. also stands out when noting that the level of coal unit availability scheduled in the 2.5 years beforehand typically oscillates around 20,000MW
(b) So this is a clear illustration of the sheer scale of the energy transition challenge that’s coming down the pipe in only 2 years.
Paraphrasing that old proverb, it will be an ‘interesting’ decade ahead…
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