On average, that’s one gas & coal plant breakdown every 2.6 days.

The Australia InstituteFollowOct 23, 2018  

Above: Yallourn W Power Station, image used under Creative Commons license.

The Australia Institute’s Gas & Coal Watch has been tracking gas and coal power plant breakdowns and gas and coal power plants have broken down 114 times this calendar year.

So we crunched the numbers and took a look.

So far this year, there have been 114 major breakdowns at gas and coal plants in the National Energy Market — including at every coal-fired power station in the NEM bar one (Mt Piper).

With 114 breakdowns recorded over just 295 days this year, this equates to, on average, one gas or coal power plant breakdown every 2.6 days.

If we look at the number of gas & coal power plant breakdowns per state, we see that Queenslanders suffered from more than twice as many breakdowns than their New South Wales counterparts.

While Victorians also experienced double the number of gas & coal power plant breakdowns than NSW, critically, Victoria has only 19% of coal power stations yet Victorians suffered from 39% of coal power breakdowns, due to their heavy reliance on brown coal plants.

Brown coal plants have broken down 38 times so far in 2018, meaning that together, coal plants have been responsible for 97 of the 114 power plant breakdowns.

Gas power plants aren’t off the hook either — they have still broken down 17 times so far in 2018.

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