A 380 megawatt (MW) unit at Victoria’s Yallourn coal power plant will be out of action for at least two weeks, after an air duct collapsed during routine maintenance early on Sunday morning.
EnergyAustralia confirmed on Tuesday that an air duct on Unit 3 of the ageing brown coal plant “detached from the boiler end and fell to the basement floor” while the unit was offline for maintenance.
No one was injured, the gentailer said in an emailed statement, and WorkSafe was immediately notified following the incident.
“We are taking this matter extremely seriously. EnergyAustralia’s priority is to ensure our people continue to remain safe,” an EnergyAustralia spokesperson said.
“Our team is investigating the matter to ensure the integrity of similar equipment at the power station. We will continue to work with WorkSafe through its investigations.
“We anticipate at this stage it will take at least two weeks to return Unit 3 to service.”
Yallourn, which is one of Australia’s dirtiest coal power plants, is due to retire from service in 2028, after its owner, EnergyAustralia, made the call to bring forward its closure date from 2032, due in part to the rising costs of maintaining the ageing kit.
A recent report found that the 1,450 MW coal plant has been “limping” to its retirement date, with an unplanned outage affecting at least one of its four generators for 32 per cent of the time over the course of 2024.
According to OpenNEM, only two of Yallourn’s units were in operation at the time of writing, with both Unit 3 and Unit 4 (380 MW) shown to be offline.
GlobalRoam’s Watt Clarity blog says its generator outages widget shows Unit 4 at Yallourn is also experiencing an unplanned outage, but is expected to return to service before Unit 3.
The increased incidence of unplanned outages at plants like Yallourn underscores the urgent need to build enough solar, wind and storage to replace them – and highlights the folly of “sweating” ageing coal assets past their use-by dates.
Rumours that the Victorian government was in talks with EnergyAustralia to do just that with Yallourn were swiftly slapped down by both state energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio and EnergyAustralia.
At the launch of construction of the four-hour, 350 MW Wooreen battery in the Latrobe Valley in February, EnergyAustralia managing director Mark Collette said Yallourn’s retirement date of June 30, 2028, was locked in – and hinted at the huge costs the company had already incurred trying to keep it match fit until that date.
“We have actually just finished the refurbishments of the four units that we committed to after 2022, which cost us about $400 million, and the purpose of that was to give the best reliability [until retirement]. Our team did a great job.”
In a statement on Tuesday, the Mining and Energy Union said the latest Yallourn incident has raised questions about the safety standards at the state’s coal stations as they reach their end-of-life.
“Workers have had very serious worries about the safety of the plant and equipment at Yallourn for quite some time,” the union’s Victorian District President said.
“Following this weekend, those fears have unfortunately been justified.
“It is unconscionable that the plant has reached the stage where it’s literally collapsing around workers while they perform their duties.”
