Eraring Power Station in the news, again … might stay open (even) longer

It was hard not to notice the headlines ‘Origin considers keeping Eraring plant open longer’ in the AFR print edition on Friday morning 15th August 2025:

It was difficult also not to see the (unintended) irony in the timing of the announcement, given

1) Today (Friday 15th August 2025) is 4 days prior to the date Tuesday 19th August 2025, when the Eraring had been slated to close in the MT PASA DUID Availability data …

…  at least until a significant change in plans was announced to change on 23rd May 2024.

2)  And also that today is less than two weeks from the expected release of the 2025 ESOO …

… which (we presume) might continue with the ‘lots of coal will close in a short space of time’ base case assumption (which we saw in the 2024 ISP and the 2024 ESOO, for instance).

These ironies speak to the large degree of uncertainties in terms of what’s actually coming down the track for energy users … and it’s no wonder there’s reporting of an investment drought on pretty much any type of supply capacity!

1)  Such as reported by the Clean Energy Council in the ‘Quarterly investment report: Large-scale renewable generation and storage’ also released this week

(a)  and subsequently discussed in the Media Release ‘Time to put the pedal to the metal on planning and productivity reforms as clean energy investment slows in first half 2025 – Q2 Report’ here.

(b)  plus then elsewhere as well.

2)  That is, of course, excepting those projects that are heavily supported by the government’s in some form (such as via the Capacity Investment Scheme)

3)  And which is driving one of the principle (and most often reported, from what I have seen) recommendation from the Nelson Review:

(a)  with respect to the formation of the ESEM

(b)  which is aligned with what the Nelson Review committee sees as their Terms of Reference (which was noted earlier here, in an article focused on different challenges of this energy transition).

So it’s useful to highlight this news from Origin Energy, as follows:

(A)  Origin Energy Annual Results

The AFR article above (along with reports elsewhere, below) were triggered by the release of the Annual Report for Origin Energy and the investor presentation:

There’s other insights shared in there that are food for other articles…

(B)  A quick review of operations

With the benefit of the (recently upgraded) ‘Trends Engine’ within ez2view

Those with their own licence to the software can open their own copy of this query here.

Over the ~11 year span of the data here, there are obviously many things that could be highlighted, but (with the help of some annotations) I’d like to highlight a couple things:

1)  Eyeballing the chart (noting I have not extracted and actually run the numbers):

(a)  in recent years it appears that perhaps the Eraring station has become a bit more more consistent in having 3 units available:

i.  Less time with 4 units

ii.  But also less time with 2 units

(b)  whereas in the first half of the years shown, it might be that there were more instances of 2 units (and 4 units) available.

… if this is actually a correct inference on the data shown, perhaps this might be due to some changes in operational practices?

2)  There’s certainly 3 standout periods where the number of units available dropped below 2:

(a)  Through (part of) October-November 2016 there’s a long period where no units were available:

i.  Which I could not recall the specifics of (and indeed had to check the data)

ii.  But subsequently found we’d written about it at the end of November in this ‘Belated record of a ‘1 in 20 years’ planned outage at Eraring Power Station that had all 4 units offline’.

(b)  On Tuesday 14th November 2023 the number of units available dropped to only 1 unit for a period of time.

i.  The day before, we’d noted ‘Forecast low System Strength of concern in NSW for Tuesday 14th November 2023 … first time ever?’;

ii.  And then followed up with ‘Case Study of inertia supplied by source in the NSW grid on Tuesday 14th November 2023’.

(c)  Also on 3rd April 2024, the number of units available dropped to only 1 unit for a period of time:

i.  We’d noted at that time the ‘Simultaneous trip of ER01 and ER02 drops mainland frequency in the NEM’; and

ii.  Then noted ‘Eraring units back’ about the RTS at the end of the day

iii. But worth noting that this categorised set of articles currently contains 7 articles, all exploring what happened.

(C)  Elsewhere, other media

In other media mastheads, we saw:

1)  In the Australian, Colin Packham chose to focus on other aspects of the Origin results, and presentation, in his article ‘Origin Energy backs Octopus split as utility’s profit, shares jump’ on Thursday 14th August.

2)  In RenewEconomy, Giles Parkinson wrote ‘Australia’s biggest energy retailer hits go slow button on wind and solar, mulling options on Eraring’ on 14th August.

3)  I saw that Christine Chen and Sneha Kumar wrote  ‘Origin Energy CEO warns Australia’s green shift costlier, slower than expected’ on Reuters.

4)  Might add more in here, as time permits…

On Social media, I saw:

1)  This update on LinkedIn by James Magill (EGM, Origin Zero) to go with the results

2)  Might add more in here, as time permits…