Liddell power station chimneys come crashing down
Updated ,first published
For more than half a century, the Liddell power station near Muswellbrook in the Upper Hunter burned mountains of black coal to produce electricity that powered the state of New South Wales.
Liddell closed in April 2023. The company’s owner, energy giant AGL, said its aging equipment was becoming increasingly unreliable and prone to sudden failures.
Today AGL detonated explosives to demolish the power station’s two concrete chimneys, each 168 meters high.
The facility is preparing to become one of the company’s low-carbon energy centers. AGL commissioned a 500-megawatt, two-hour grid-scale battery system at the site earlier this year and plans to develop an eight-hour pumped hydroelectric storage project nearby.
“The demolition paves the way for a new future for the Upper Hunter,” AGL site transition manager Brad Williams told the ABC.
While coal has been the backbone of Australia’s electricity market for decades, its years of powering the grid are numbered. More than half of the remaining coal-fired generators on the east coast are scheduled to close by 2035 as their older, emissions-intensive equipment becomes less reliable and competitive against cheaper renewable energy sources. The Australian Energy Market Operator expects coal to be completely off the grid by 2040. Energy companies and governments are spending billions of dollars assembling a larger, more complex grid by building wind and solar farms, batteries and transmission lines to future-proof the grid.
More to come
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Nick Toscano is an economic correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.Connect with: X or email.
