As Australia transitions away from fossil fuels, much of the debate surrounds the costs – and demands – of building all the new clean energy that will be required. But there's another part of the shift that's getting less attention the huge and expensive task of decommissioning the coal-fired power plants that have powered WA for decades.
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00:00The sight and sound of heavy machinery, but not as it defined this place for so long.
00:08At Kwinana, in Perth South, the demolition machines are busy at work, and a former coal
00:13fired power station that once kept the city's lights on is coming down.
00:17I think there was four units this side, two on this side, you know, 400 odd megawatt power
00:24station, so it was a big plant in its day.
00:28Built in the 1970s, the Kwinana Power Station was part of a fleet of coal plants that used
00:33to provide almost all of Perth's electricity.
00:36It closed in 2016, and the state-owned WA power provider Synergy is now spending $250
00:43million to painstakingly deconstruct the site.
00:46The utility hopes the process can provide some useful lessons as it prepares to close
00:51its remaining coal plants at Collie and Mooja later this decade.
00:55Coal will be gone by 2030 in Synergy's fleet, and there's a number of reasons for that.
01:01One is our power stations will be at their end of life.
01:04Next door, Synergy has spent the better part of a billion dollars building two large-scale
01:09batteries, and is investing billions more in clean energy to replace the coal.
01:13But it says the task of decommissioning the old plants cannot be ignored.
01:17Because the easy thing for organisations to do is just focus on building all the new shiny
01:23projects, which are amazing projects in their own right, but you can't forget about the
01:28old power stations that have been turned off.
01:31Observers agree, but worry taxpayers will be left to pick up most of the cost.
01:36The clean-up cost when coal is eventually gone, and that's not many years away, will
01:40be absolutely massive.
01:42This site is the embodiment of the energy transition in many ways.
01:45The Kwinana Power Station once provided much of Perth's electricity, but it's been pushed
01:50out and is no longer needed.
01:52It's been deconstructed to make way for renewable energy.
01:56That's over a quarter of our power is still coming from coal, and that coal isn't here
02:00in five years' time.
02:02And a lot of people are worried that there's no real clarity from the government about,
02:08in that very short period of time, how that generation is going to be replaced.
02:12Synergy says, one way or another, coal plants like Kwinana will disappear.
02:17They are part of the landscape, and this was definitely part of the Kwinana landscape for
02:20many decades, but we move on.
02:23From the ruins of one industry, rises another.