AGL mining coal? Do they mine under another name?
Nothing's hidden. AGL operates the Loy Yang mine which is just outside Traralgon (Vic). Production is about 80,000 tonnes per day with a third of that sold to Alinta and the remainder used by AGL itself.
Energy Australia also mines coal not far away at Yallourn, production being about half that of AGL's, but also has the Pine Dale mine in NSW.
Now before anyone gets all excited with this and decides to switch their electricity account away from AGL or EA in protest, let me tell you now that would be completely the wrong approach.
If you were to go to AGL's coal mine then issues of CO2 aside, it's undeniably a rather massive and impressive operation. There's a public viewing area that anyone can access which overlooks it all.
Now if you follow the big conveyor belts you'll come to Loy Yang power stations. Note that's plural since there's two, conveniently named "A" and "B". AGL owns the "A" station and Alinta owns the half size "B" station next door. It would have been the same size but only half was ever built.
Now at this site you'll notice that the nice flat bit of land where the second half of Loy Yang B station was going to go has some gas turbines out the front. Indeed it does and they belong to Snowy Hydro.
If you follow the transmission lines from these gas turbines you'll find it goes to Alinta's Loy Yang B station and then goes around the back of AGL's Loy Yang A station where there's a great big switch yard. You'll find some other transmission lines there too, those being the ones owned by yet another entity but under contract to Hydro Tasmania (aka Momentum Energy). Via a DC coverter station and undersea cable it ends up at George Town (Tas).
Competition? Oh yes, that's right. Competition. Tell the public there's competition. Or something. Yep, gotta remember the competition bit. Not that I'm not suggesting any wrongdoing or illegal collusion here. I'm just pointing out that engineering reality is a world away from the ideas of economists, politicians and the ACCC. Round pegs, square hole - there's the problem.
Now if you're in Melbourne and looking in the right place you might have spotted that Newport power station, which spends a lot of time doing not much, has sprung to life over the weekend. Indeed it has, AGL have had 2 x 560 MW units out of operation at Loy Yang and Energy Australia has a 510 MW machine sitting idle at Newport. So fire it up then.
Coal? Oh yeah, the coal. Truth is no matter who you buy your electricity from it's going to make precisely zero difference to how much coal AGL or EA are digging up and it's not going to stop the train loads of the stuff being bought by Origin either. If someone's got a wind farm or solar then it's being fully used, some if its production being used by consumers billed through AGL or Alinta etc, and switching your retail account to that "green" company won't make it produce any more. And suffice to say that your nice green non-coal burning supplier will be outright ****ing themselves and having a crisis meeting if AGL's mine floods or catches fire indeed they'll far more likely end up broke because of it than AGL will (seriously).
Now this Smurf prefers to call things as they a really are. There's one grid and one set of generating facilities. Shuffling the names around and who owns which bit creates a nice illusion that it's like buying apples in a competitive market but that's a very long way from reality. It's competition yes, but competition of the "everyone wins a prize anyway" variety so far as generation is concerned since that's the inevitable outcome in a system where you actually do need all the bits comprising it.
If the aim is to resolve all this then it really comes down to needing the administration to suit the engineering and not the reverse. I don't care who owns it but do away with the nonsense which says the owners of part A really mustn't co-operate with the owners of parts B, C or D who also mustn't co-operate with each other. That's just economic ideology out of control and it's making this whole thing far more difficult than it really needs to be. It might be tolerable if it had at least cut prices but in truth they're up sharply so there's no benefit there either.
Left to their own devices I'm very sure that the electricity industry could be rid of coal completely within 30 years and would have most of the job done within 20. With sensible planning and co-operation it's not at all hard to achieve that and I'm very sure that the private and government owned generators alike are up to the task from a technical perspective. They each have a role to play, and they've got a pretty good idea already what that is and where their company's strengths and weaknesses lie, so it just needs government to get out of the way.
Now that timeframe might not excite those on the "green" side too much, they'll want it done sooner, but let's face reality. There's no coherent policy or leadership from government and indeed there's outright obstruction. Despite that, assorted electricity generation businesses have between them worked out what and how to do it. Can't talk to each other about it of course but with a bit of trial and error and putting things in the media it has sort of been figured out that the mostly within 20 years / all within 30 years bit is achievable.
Now just imagine what could be done if government was actually on side and provided leadership? Or if the various generation owners were able to have open and frank discussions and come up with a joint plan without someone going to jail for doing so? That's where you start getting shorter timeframes and driving down costs as well.