Renewables Boom Pushes Australia's Gas Power to Quarter-Century Low - Crude Oil Prices Today | OilPrice.com

Australia's coal-fired gas power generation has fallen to its lowest level in a quarter-century, driven by the rapid expansion of renewable capacity and falling battery storage costs. The article does not give a specific percentage decline or current generation mix, but notes that gas use is being displaced by solar and wind, with storage becoming cheaper and more deployable.

Where this fits

This is a cost and reliability story tangled together. Renewables are displacing gas at speed, which is cheap on a per-megawatt-hour basis. But the premise of Energy Realism is that a renewables-only grid has under-counted its whole-system cost: you need gas plants kept spinning (or quickly ramped up) to firm weather-dependent solar and wind, and you need transmission overbuild to move power across the continent when the sun sets or wind stalls. The gas fleet is being mothballed before the firming problem is solved, not after.

What it means

Retiring gas capacity sounds like an energy transition win until you ask what happens on a windless, cloudy evening when battery reserves are low. Australia is building a grid that depends on gas for reliability while shrinking the gas fleet that does the job. The sovereignty cost is separate: Australia controls its domestic gas and coal; solar panels, batteries, inverters and rare-earth magnets come from China's supply chain. A firm, domestic alternative, nuclear, is banned by law. This is not a critique of renewables themselves. It is a pattern: fast renewable build, slow firm capacity retirement, and no credible domestic substitute for firming or minerals, leaving Australia dependent on Chinese supply for the missing pieces.