Beginning of the end: Eraring power station decommissioning project begins - Newcastle Herald

Ausgrid has begun decommissioning Eraring, a 2,880 megawatt black coal plant near Newcastle that will close at the end of 2025. The project involves planning for site remediation, heritage assessment, and asset disposal across a multi-year timeline.

Where this fits

Eraring is Australia's single largest dispatchable generator. Its closure removes firm power from the grid at the exact moment when renewables are climbing toward 50 per cent of supply. The decommissioning itself will cost money and take years; the real cost lies in what replaces it. Eraring ran continuously. Its successor will be weather-dependent solar and wind, backed by gas plants that sit idle most of the time but must be built, maintained and fueled to handle the gaps. This is the hidden bill: a renewables-only transition does not replace coal one-for-one with cheaper alternatives. It replaces firm, long-lived, low-material coal with three systems at once: generation, firming, and transmission overbuild. The firm-power alternative, nuclear, remains banned by law.

What it means

Australia is now committed to losing 2,880 megawatts of controllable capacity with no equivalent replacement in prospect. The grid will depend on weather, on gas for the calm days, and on faster transmission build-out to move renewable output across distance. This is a preparedness problem: if supply chains for panels, batteries or inverters are disrupted, or if geopolitical pressure targets Australia's LNG import terminals, the grid has no buffer. Eraring closing is not the problem. The problem is the path chosen to fill that hole.