Lithgow, with its coalmines, power stations and cauldron-like geography, used to be a lure for young public health officials, keen to study the effects of the heavy pollution. Nestled on the western edge of the Blue Mountains about two hours from Sydney, the gritty industrial town hosted Australia’s first steelworks. Residents were given coal for next to nothing to burn during the cold winters.
“The place was just full of smog,” says Chris Jonkers, now an activist with the Lithgow Environment Group, whose father worked in the nearby state coalmine for about nine years before its closure in 1964. “He’d come home black every day.”
Casting off that image hasn’t been easy. The town’s mayor, Maree Statham, admits some members of the Australian Caravan Club, which this week drew 120 vans to a large sporting field, were wary of this year’s choice for their annual muster.
“A lot of them thought that they would drive down a hill and see all this smog,” Statham says. “Well, I said, ‘that hasn’t happened for a very long time’.”
Now the challenge is almost the opposite. As with towns in the Hunter region of NSW and Victoria’s Latrobe valley, where the exit from coalmining and power generation is also under way, Lithgow needs to attract new industries in a hurry.
“We’ve got to try and be prepared now for what’s going to be racing up to us,” Statham says. “It’s not crawling.”
Craig Butler, Lithgow council’s general manager, says the lesson from other regions where “we fall off the cliff or when economies collapse” is that the government response typically fails.
“Transitioning the economy isn’t easy – it’s costly and it takes many years,” Butler says. “How do you find your way into the future?”
Potential power vacuum
One handicap is not knowing when Lithgow’s remaining power station, EnergyAustralia’s 1,430MW Mount Piper plant, and three coalmines owned by Centennial Coal will cease operation. The closures may come much sooner than is widely understood and would trigger shockwaves to the region. Butler says a third of the area’s output is at stake.
The Mount Piper plant relies on Centennial’s Springvale mine for most of its coal and supplies up to 15% of the state’s power.
A spokesperson for Hong Kong-owned EnergyAustralia said it was impossible to say with any certainty when Mount Piper might close.
“While we have now committed to transition out of coal-fired power generation by 2040, the final closure date for Mount Piper will be dependent on factors such as fuel supply arrangements, alternative dispatchable capacity in place and decisions of other investors,” the spokesperson said.
Earlier this month, the company said it was studying the feasibility of a giant 500MW battery for the Mount Piper site. If approved, it could power about 200,000 homes for four hours a day by the end of 2026.
EnergyAustralia said the battery was “not intended as a replacement for energy generation”, but Statham says the plan indicates the life of the plant “may be less” than what has been stated publicly.
NSW is already facing a potential supply gap, with Eraring, Australia’s biggest fossil-fuel power plant at 2,880MW, closing as soon as 2025, one government insider said. Another person familiar with the state’s energy policy said he would be “shocked” if Mount Piper closed before 2030.
Dylan McConnell, an energy expert at the University of Melbourne, said it would not be a big surprise if Mount Piper exited “well before 2040”, but closure within a few years would be “an extremely difficult, likely impossible proposition for NSW”.
Workers in the industries are certainly wary that, as in other regions, closures may be brought forward with little notice.
Gus Maloney, an underground supervisor at Springvale, reckons his mine has about four years to run. Clarence – thought to be Centennial’s only profitable mine because it exports at far higher prices than are capped at Mount Piper – “has got a bit longer than us but not a great deal”.
The region’s coal reserves are depleted after more than a century and a half of extraction and what’s left can be difficult to mine.
Springvale “is just non-stop pumping” because of water seepage, Maloney says. Ironically, some of it comes from the long-abandoned state mine nearby, which has filled with water.
At stake are the jobs of more than 300 miners at both Springvale and Clarence, and many more supported by suppliers. Maloney says miners who earn an average of about $120,000 a year would be lucky to make half that in other fields if the mines close.
Maloney, 42, has spent almost 25 years in mining, following his father into the pits. Last week, he farewelled a “young bloke” doing a similar job at Clarence who is moving his family to a coalmine in central Queensland. To give himself more options, Maloney is studying to be a project manager and isn’t sure if he’ll stay in Lithgow.
Thailand-owned Centennial says it employs about 830 people and contributes hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the local economy.
“We expect both Springvale and Clarence mines to continue operating into the future, providing the Lithgow region with strong and stable employment,” a spokesperson said. It also “looks forward to continuing” its partnership with EnergyAustralia and “working through supply options”.
Alternatives meet opposition
What fills the economic void, though, isn’t clear, particularly as there is local opposition to some of the major alternatives.
EnergyAustralia has proposed a 335MW pumped-hydro plant using its own land and water, but some residents worry about a potentially “monstrous” dam being built on the town-facing side of Mount Walker and the loss of amenity as water levels rise and fall daily on Lake Lyall below.
Similarly, plans for a $700m waste-to-energy incinerator to be built on the site of Lithgow’s other old power plant, the defunct Wallerawang power station, won council support only to be ruled out by the NSW deputy premier, Paul Toole, in May.
“We should always be looking at new initiatives and ways of bringing new industry and jobs to the area but it’s critical these industries have the backing of the community,” says Toole, the state National party leader who is also the MP for the region.
Ann Thompson, the president of the Lithgow District Chamber of Commerce and a former councillor, says the people of the area “deserve better than taking 700,000 tonnes a year of Sydney’s waste”.
She points to the potential for tourism not least because of Lithgow’s proximity to the Gardens of Stone, a wild region of spectacular sandstone formations.
“I don’t know why the best we could get was an incinerator,” Thompson says.
Supporters of the project include the local business group Back to Basics, of which Maloney is a member, and the Black Gold Motel, located right next to the partly demolished power station.
Brad Cluff, who helps his family run the motel, says the region needs such new investment, given the promise of a 50MW plant, proposed greenhouses and other businesses. He worries that a “loud minority voice is all that’s needed to block new ventures Lithgow badly needs”.
“It wouldn’t matter what sort of change it was that was going to occur. ‘I don’t want my life interrupted by change, I want it to be as of yesterday’– that’s exactly how they did it,”Cluff says.
His mother, Linda, is more to the point: nobody worried when the power station was next door, raining ash and other material on them.
“Yep, that was fine,” she says.
