Some sensible comments from Transgrid, to be in 'The Australian' print edition of Thursday 19 June 2025:
Australia’s largest electricity transmission company, Transgrid, pointed to volatile conditions in Victoria in the last week...
“Because we’ve stripped out all our buffers, it’s left us fairly exposed. And the risk to transition is that people lose confidence in the system. Because on those days where things go wrong, no one’s going to want to hear explained to them how statistically, that seemed very unlikely... even as people are taking cold showers.”
Victoria’s energy system has been under renewed strain after outages at major coal and gas plants forced increased gas-powered electricity generation, sending wholesale prices soaring on Thursday and exposing vulnerabilities in the state’s decarbonisation strategy.
Yallourn — Victoria’s second-largest power station — was operating at only half its normal output while output from wind and solar farms was subdued and gas supplies were reduced from ExxonMobil’s Longford plant, the dominant supplier to eastern Australia.
The Transgrid boss wants a unified push for more energy supplies as a Plan B.
“We also are seeing a thinner and thinner system. So whether it means accelerating some gas peakers for example. A lot is being done with batteries but can we see some batteries installed even faster,” said Mr Redman, “maybe a very difficult but honest conversation about how we have a schedule of coal closure that supports the maintenance of the units that are there.”
He described a coal future on an “if we need them” basis.
“And so we switch them off when we’re ready to switch them off, not when they just turn off because they’ve started to fall over. I’d start prioritising a little more extra buffer in the system as insurance..."
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I bet lunatic Federal Labor Minister Chris Bowen takes no notice. And as for State Labor Ministers like hopeless Lily D'Ambrosio in Victoria, double that.
(20min delay)