Power stations pledge to fix outages in time for summer

Origin and AGL are promising power customers there will be no rolling blackouts over summer as they work furiously to repair problems at the state’s largest power station before the heat arrives.

Victoria’s largest power station is “confident” a broken unit will be repaired before the peak of summer, ­following warnings of blackouts affecting over a million homes.

Loy Yang A, owned by AGL, had an electrical blowout in June, taking up to 500MW of power out of the state’s grid.

It was followed by an outage at the Mortlake gas-fired power station, owned by Origin Energy, which took out up to 259MW.

Both companies say they are on track to repair the problems by mid-December.

The Loy Yang A power station in the Latrobe Valley. Picture: Aaron Francis

As revealed on Friday, the Australian Energy Market ­Operator warned that the risk of blackouts hitting as many as 1.3 million homes was high as a result of looming shortages. It also said costly emergency ­reserves were likely to be used.

The AEMO called for a ­rethink of the “reliability standard” used in Australia as the benchmark of how often consumers are prepared to suffer power outages.

Director of the energy program at Grattan Institute, Tony Wood, said a new standard meant considering “how much should we pay for how much reliability?”

If more reliability was sought, that would require major investment in ­generation, he said.

Debate raged this week over the lack of supply in Victoria, with the state and federal governments pointing the ­finger at each another.

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor said: “If the Victorian government continues to insist it can knock down coal-fired power stations and replace them with solar and wind, which hasn’t got the backup to keep the lights on and keep prices down, then it needs to be held to account”.

But state Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said the state government did not own the power stations and constant changes to federal policy hurt the market.

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She warned it was getting harder to rely on older generators to patch up problems.

“The problem is, when you have a look at the record of the failures of some of these old generators, the dates they say they’ll come back are becoming less and less reliable,” Ms D’Ambrosio said.

Energy Users’ Association of Australia chief executive Andy Richards said there was a fundamental shift occurring in our energy system, “and without nationwide co-ordination of this transition, energy bills will only go up and reliability will fall”.

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