Australia reached a renewable energy milestone in December, with coal power making up a record low proportion of total energy generated.
The image below is from the National Energy Market’s website. You can see that renewable energy made up a record 42% of power generated in Australia in December.
Rooftop solar is still our major source for renewable energy, at 14% of generation. Then comes wind power plants at 13%, solar plants at 9% (December was a record month for our solar power plants) and lastly hydropower with 6%.
South Australia continues to lead all comers in this respect. The state’s renewable energy generation reached 85% of total demand in the month of December, surpassing its previous record of 76% set in December 2021.
Black coal meanwhile was 6,679GWh for the month of December, following on from 6,474GWh for November. The previous month when black coal power generation had been this low was December 1998, when total power generation was a tick under 60% of current generation.
December’s coal power generation was around 44% of the coal fleet’s full capacity. This means there is more than enough scope for the close of the 1.5GW Liddell coal power plant, which is scheduled for the first half of 2023.
The other key take-away is that the proportion of our power generated by renewables is growing very rapidly. Total renewable power doubled from 2011-2018, then doubled again during 2018-2022.
With the political roadblocks from that era being gradually erased by state and federal governments, one can certainly hope to see this trend continue. Very much contrary to claims that environmentalists are self-hating woke moralists bent on reducing our quality of life, the seeds of a high-energy future are being laid in the renewable energy transition.
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