According to Renew Economy: "The Queensland LNP state government’s fossil-first energy strategy has come under renewed attack after yet another dramatic outage at the troubled Callide coal generator which also forced a brief evacuation of the plant.

Market analysts say battery storage responded quickly to the outage to arrest the sudden frequency excursion caused by the double failure and the loss of 800 megawatts (MW) of output.

But the Mt Stuart diesel generator, currently burning kerosene, was also switched on, helping push prices in the evening peak to more than $20,000/MWh.

It is the latest in a series of disasters at the Callide coal complex, which is proving a massive liability for the Queensland grid, despite government efforts to rebuild the facility following an explosion in 2021 that nearly caused a state-wide blackout.

The Callide C4 unit had to be completely rebuilt – at a cost of more than $200 million – but the facility also experienced a structural failure in its cooling towers, and last April there was another incident in its boilers that required two months of repairs at one unit.

The latest outage also comes just two months after the completion of an $80 million overhaul of Unit C3, which forced it offline for three months from August, and which CS Energy described as the biggest ever maintenance spend at the coal facility.

Queensland’s coal fleet is the youngest but least reliable in the National Electricity Market.

When the LNP went to the last election with the mantra of taking on young recalcitrant few realised they were talking about the fossil fuel industry