Bayswater and Eraring are running less, not breaking down more

Every quarter AEMO publishes Quarterly Energy Dynamics, its own accounting of what actually happened in the power system, including a table most coverage skips: output, availability and utilisation for each black-coal station in NSW. Availability measures how much of a plant’s capacity was technically ready to run; utilisation measures how much of that available capacity the market actually called on. The gap between those two numbers is where the energy transition stops being a projection and becomes a line in an operating report.

Utilisation of each NSW black-coal station, first quarter of 2025 (open dot) to first quarter of 2026 (filled dot). Redrawn from the data in AEMO’s QED Q1 2026, p. 27 (Figure 37 and accompanying text).

Available, and not called on

Bayswater is the sharpest case in the state. Its availability rose 347 MW, up 15 per cent year on year, the plant offering the market a seventh more capacity than it did last March quarter, and its utilisation still fell ten percentage points, the steepest drop of any NSW black-coal station. Output slipped only slightly, 12 MW on average, because the higher availability partly offset the lower call. Eraring ran harder than any other NSW coal plant, as it usually does, and still eased from 84 to 81 per cent utilisation on availability that was itself slightly up. Across the border of the region, Delta’s Vales Point B was the only NSW station to generate more than a year earlier, and even its utilisation fell, from 73 to 63 per cent, because its availability had risen faster still.

A plant that is broken shows the opposite signature: availability down, utilisation of what remains high. What the March quarter shows, in AEMO’s own numbers, is a fleet that is intact and increasingly left uncalled, the lost running spread across most hours of the day. The distinction matters locally because “the old plants are failing” and “the old plants are being outbid” imply different futures for the people who work in them: the first ends in unplanned breakdowns, the second in scheduled exits like the ones already on the calendar.

What did the displacing

The same report names the competition. Renewables supplied a record 46.5 per cent of NEM generation for a first quarter, up from 42.5; black coal’s share of supply fell from 40.4 to 37.4 per cent; NEM-wide coal generation hit a Q1 record low. The fastest-moving newcomer is storage: grid battery discharge averaged 359 MW, more than triple a year earlier, after 4,445 MW of new battery capacity entered the market in twelve months, the fleet passing 8,000 MW, much of it charging cheaply in the solar middle of the day, exactly the hours coal used to own, and selling into the evening peak. Gas ran at its lowest quarterly average since 1999.

And one number cuts off the easy explanation: demand did not fall. NEM-wide underlying demand set a quarterly record, and NSW’s rose 3 per cent, the only notable increase of any region, with data-centre load up 18 per cent year on year. More electricity was wanted than ever; less of it came from the coal stations that were more available than a year earlier. Wholesale prices tell the same story from a third angle: the NSW quarterly average fell 16 per cent year on year to $73/MWh.

One quarter is a data point, not a destiny, which is why this masthead will re-read the station table every quarter and extend the chart above as the series grows. But the direction of the squeeze is now documented at station level, by name, in the market operator’s own accounting: the Hunter’s coal plants are not being pushed out by their own failures. They are being outbid.