This month, Rio Tinto announced plans to bring forward the closure of Gladstone Power Station to 2029, six years ahead of schedule. The move was welcomed by environmental groups, as Gladstone is Queensland’s oldest and largest coal-fired station. It has struggled to compete with emerging renewable generation in recent years and outages have become more frequent.
The large 1.6 gigawatt plant feeds much of its power to the nearby Boyne aluminium smelter, which uses roughly the same amount of power as all of residential Sydney or twice the demand of residential Brisbane.
To fill the gap, Rio Tinto has secured about 3GW of renewable power capacity. That may seem impressive, but the variability of renewables means the actual power produced will be roughly a quarter of this.
