Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients.
Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.
A number of recently announced closures of (and cut-backs in) a variety of coal-fired power station units across the NEM (including Northern, Yallourn, Munmorah and Tarong) – claimed to be a result of carbon pricing – generated significant interest in the press, and interested us to open NEM-Review and have a look at longer term trends, and the extent to which that attribution might be true.
A shorter article – thinking more about the future, prompted by one of the factors that contributed to the price volatility seen in South Australia on Friday 12th March 2021
Yesterday (Wed 18th Oct 2023) Origin Energy held its Annual General Meeting, with discussion wide-ranging. Here’s two things that jumped out to me about the Eraring Power Station, which is currently slated to close in 2025.
It’s now seven months since the SCADA outage on Sunday 24th January 2021 – and we’re finally able to complete and publish this (quite long) article exploring some of the implications for units on the LHS of the ‘Q>>NIL_CLWU_RGLC’ constraint equation
2 Commentson "ABC reports ‘Rio Tinto’s Gladstone coal-fired power station could be retired early’"
This is just the usual posturing we are seeing from industry claiming they will shut down and then having the Government throw money at them to stay open.
Very blatant that they choose to make this announcement with the new QLD Energy Plan to be released in less than a fortnight.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/01/gladstone-queensland-biggest-coal-fired-power-station-could-close-six-years-early
Alison Reeve from the Grattan Institute just told ABC News that power mainly goes to alu smelters which need reliable supply 14/7
When you look at the last 7 days “baseload” was 550 MW. But Gladstone also provided up to 1,230 MW during peak demand
This is just the usual posturing we are seeing from industry claiming they will shut down and then having the Government throw money at them to stay open.
Very blatant that they choose to make this announcement with the new QLD Energy Plan to be released in less than a fortnight.