CANBERRA: The coal furnaces at Alinta Energy’s Port Augusta power station in South Australia’s north will go cold today as it goes offline. The Northern Power Station was disconnected from the network about 9:40am. Less than a year ago, Alinta Energy announced the station — which is the city’s bigger employer — would close after the company struggled to compete with government-backed renewable energy.
The company closed its coal mine at Leigh Creek, which fuelled its Playford A power station late last year, but trainloads of coal have been making the journey to the power station several times a week until only recently.
The mine had employed more than 250 people. Alinta chief executive Jeff Dimery said the closure was sad for workers but inevitable. “The reality is, the technology we are using here is old, the cost structures are high and there’s no longer a place for us in the market,” Mr Dimery said.
“It was inevitable. It is inevitable that more coal-fired power stations will close into the future.” He said some families had three generations who worked in energy production at the site, which started with the State Electricity Company. Port Augusta’s mayor Sam Johnson said the power station helped diversify the city’s economy when it was a rail hub in the 1940s and 50s. “It gave a significant economic injection into Port Augusta both then and over its 62-year history,” he said. “[It’s] a bit of a mixed feeling in Port Augusta at the moment and we’ve all known this now for the last 11 months that it is coming to an end. “It will have a big impact on Port August, big impact on the region and a big impact on the state.”
