Coal Power Failure Casts Shadow Over Australia’s Energy Planning

摘要

A coal-fired power station outage that left thousands of Australian customers without electricity is awkwardly timed for the nation’s government, which is offering support for thecontinued operation of an aging fleet of fossil-fuel plants.A fire at CS Energy Ltd.’s Callide power station on Tuesday took several of its generation units out of service and caused widespread disruption to transmission lines, the company said in astatement. Some 375,000 customers were impacted by the outage, according to electricity distribution company Energex.“Our focus is on understanding the cause of the incident and importantly what needs to be done to get our units safely back online,” said CS Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bills. One of theunits may be unavailable for 12 months, the company said.