WWF-Australia - for a living planet

Hazelwood - the dirtiest power station in the world?

In many ways Australia can be regarded as a modern country that plays a leading role among industrialised nations. Not when it comes to electricity generation though.

In the 21st Century Australia is still heavily dependent on old-fashioned 19th Century power-generating technology based on coal; more heavily than the EU, Japan, the United States, and developing countries like China and India.

Electricity in Australia's second largest State, Victoria, is generated primarily by coal-fired power plants using brown coal, the most greenhouse gas polluting of all fossil fuels.

Because of its reliance on brown coal, Victoria has the highest rate of greenhouse pollution in Australia, and indeed one of the highest rates of pollution in the world. The dubious honour of the worst greenhouse gas polluting coal-fired power station in Australia goes to Hazelwood, owned by International Power in the UK.

WWF's PowerSwitch! campaign is challenging power companies on every continent to move away from fossil fuels, including the most polluting coal-fired power plants1 in:

Country Most polluting station CO2 intensity (Mt/TWh)2
Australia Hazelwood, Victoria 1.58
USA Edwardsport, Indiana 1.56
Germany Frimmersdorf 1.27
Canada H.R. Milner 1.25
Mexico C. TG. Portes Gil, Rio Bravo 1.18
Poland Belchatów 1.09
Czech Republic Prunerov 1.07
Japan Niihamanishi 1.02
UK Cockenzie 0.99
Italy Porto Tolle 0.78

Hazelwood is spewing out an astonishing 1.58 Mega tonnes of carbon per TWh, or about 18 million big hot air balloons of carbon pollution each year (see table above), and is the most polluting of the major1 coal-fired power stations WWF has come across in the OECD, and possibly the world!

Not only is it the most polluting power station we've been able to find, but it's actually getting worse. A recent study found that between 1998-2004 Hazelwood's emissions intensity trend increased 2.7%, despite AU$500 (€310) million being spent on environment initiatives and plant improvements since 1996.

WWF has been working with other environmental groups for over two years to try and stop Hazelwood being granted access to new coal. But the government is currently deliberating whether to extend Hazelwood's life until 2031!

We're calling for Victoria to start phasing out its dependence on greenhouse-intensive brown coal, and start utilising natural gas in its place, combined with energy efficiency and investment into renewable energies.

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Footnotes and Sources

Footnotes

  1. WWF has analysed power stations with an annual production of more than 100 GWh (output Hazelwood = 12,000 GWh). Smaller stations and stations co-firing gaseous by-products from coke and steel production have not been considered.
  2. Greenhouse pollution is measured in emissions intensity (Mt/TWh), which indicates how much pollution, measured in millions of tonnes of CO2 (Mt), is produced for each unit of electricity sent out from a power plant, measured in Tera Watt hours (TWh or one billion kWh).

Sources