Australia’s dependence on gas generation during evening energy peak falls by almost 70% - The Guardian

Gas generation's contribution to Australia's evening peak load has fallen from around 28% in 2019 to roughly 9% in 2024, according to analysis cited by The Guardian. The shift reflects rapid growth in rooftop solar and battery storage, which flatten the evening demand curve that once relied on gas peaking plants to cover the hours after sunset.

Where this fits

This is a reliability story, not a sovereignty one. The decline in gas dependency during peak hours is genuine progress on the firm-power question: batteries and distributed solar are doing what peaking gas was hired to do. However, the metric masks a deeper cost. Displacing peak gas does not eliminate the need for firm capacity; it relocates and transforms it. The grid still requires something to hold voltage and frequency during low-solar, low-wind hours. That requirement has not disappeared. It has shifted to battery duration, which in turn depends on global supply chains for lithium, cobalt, and processed minerals. Australia is not materially sovereign over those chains.

What it means

Evening peaks are now easier to manage with available technology. But Australia is still building a grid that requires foreign minerals in unprecedented volumes, with no domestic processing infrastructure for battery-grade materials. Falling gas use is not the same as solving the firm-power problem; it is solving one part of it by borrowing against another. The real test of reliability will come in winter, during multi-day low-solar events, when battery duration becomes critical and the cost of that duration becomes visible.