Two curiosities about upcoming outages at Eraring Power Station

Eraring Power Station, Origin Energy's four-unit coal plant, has scheduled a rolling sequence of maintenance outages across all four generators over the coming weeks. Three units show reduced availability on 10 October. Unit ER03 is currently offline for unplanned maintenance, with ER04 scheduled to begin a similar outage five days after ER03's return, followed by ER02 when ER04 comes back online. The timing and nomenclature, multiple "unplanned" outages scheduled weeks in advance, suggests a common fault across all four units, though the specific issue has not been disclosed.

Where this fits

Eraring is one of Australia's last large dispatchable power plants, generating firm baseload power on demand. Unplanned maintenance, especially cascading outages affecting multiple units, exposes a core vulnerability: as coal plants age without replacement by equivalent firm capacity, their failures create gaps that renewables cannot fill on windless, sunless days. The NEM must then rely on gas and imports to cover demand, or face shortfalls. This is the cost of a transition strategy that retires firm power faster than it builds firm alternatives.

What it means

Australia is losing dispatchable capacity without a like-for-like substitute. Nuclear, which carries the same dispatchability, emissions profile and low material intensity as coal but with far longer asset life and no fuel supply chain risk, remains prohibited by law. Each Eraring maintenance event reveals the grid's growing brittleness: Australia is betting on weather, without the insurance policy it has chosen not to build.