Watch: Liddell power station chimneys come crashing down

For more than half a century, the Liddell power station, near Muswellbrook in the Upper Hunter, burned mountains of black coal to generate electricity that powered the state of New South Wales.

Liddell closed in April 2023. Its owner, energy giant AGL, said its ageing equipment had become increasingly unreliable and prone to sudden breakdowns.

Today, AGL detonated explosives to bring down the power station’s two concrete chimney stacks, each towering 168 metres tall.

The site is earmarked to become one of the company’s lower-carbon energy hubs. AGL switched on a 500-megawatt, two-hour grid-scale battery system on the site earlier this year, and has plans to develop an eight-hour pumped hydro storage project nearby.

“The Liddell power station has been iconic in the Upper Hunter,” AGL site transition manager Brad Williams told the ABC. “Many of our former employees will have mixed emotions.”

But the demolition would now open up new opportunities to “reuse and repurpose the site”, he added. “[It] does pave the way for a new future for the Upper Hunter,” he said.

While coal has been the backbone of Australia’s electricity market for decades, its years left powering the grid are numbered. More than half of the remaining coal-powered generators on the eastern seaboard are scheduled to close by 2035, as their old, emissions-intensive equipment become less reliable and competitive against cheaper renewables. The Australian Energy Market Operator expects coal to leave the grid entirely by 2040. To ready the grid for the future, energy companies and governments have been pouring billions of dollars into building wind and solar farms, batteries and transmission lines to stitch together a bigger and more complex grid.

More to come

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