One Nation wants to keep the Latrobe Valley’s coal plants open and build a new site entirely. However the party, nor its candidate in Narracan, Ben Lucas, can say how much it will cost.
What happened: With an increasing amount of unplanned power outages and high maintenance costs, the future of Gippsland’s coal-fired power plants is a major question for local candidates heading into the state election.
Operators say many of the plants are no longer commercially viable, as rising costs combine with the global energy market’s shift to renewables. In Victoria, renewable energy delivered 44.6 percent of the state’s electricity generation in 2025.
During a candidate forum in Narracan this week, One Nation candidate Ben Lucas refused to rule out using taxpayer money to extend the life of coal plants in the Latrobe Valley, but could not give a figure of how much something like that would cost.
One Nation candidate for Narracan Ben Lucas.
Quick recap: The Latrobe Valley is home to three coal-fired power plants, two at Loy Yang and one at Yallourn.
The companies that operate them, AGL, Alinta Energy and Energy Australia, have all confirmed the stations will be decommissioned with Yallourn the first in mid-2028.
Energy Australia chief executive Mark Collette told the Australian Financial Review that its Yallourn coal generator was struggling to remain reliable and profitable amid the rise of cheaper renewables, and this meant extending its life was not on the agenda.
AGL, Alinta Energy and Energy Australia all have plans to construct renewable energy projects on the sites of the coal power stations.
The Loy Yang coal-fired power station.
Keep Loy Yang firing: Despite these statements, Victoria One Nation leader Warren Pickering said when announcing the party’s energy policy in August they would force energy company AGL to keep Loy Yang operating past its scheduled 2035 closure date.
But at a press conference to launch the policy, Pickering said Energy Australia’s Yallourn coal plant had “significantly deteriorated” and “might be too far gone” to save.
For Narracan candidate Lucas, the story is slightly different.
“It's humming along nicely by all accounts,” he told the Monitor, “and it can stay open for a little bit longer. It’s definitely going down… but there's a few more years in it yet if we choose.”
New plant: Lucas said One Nation will look to maintain the ageing plants until it is able to build a new coal-fired station, which he said could be achieved within three years.
When asked if he knew how much a new coal-fired plant in the Latrobe Valley would cost Lucas said: “Not off the top of my head.”
One Nation’s policy statements, the party’s broader state policy platform and wider media coverage of the party’s energy announcement do not include costings for a new plant in the Latrobe Valley.
Unreliable: Reliability Watch, an organisation that monitors coal plant breakdowns around Australia, released a report last year that found Yallourn was one of the least reliable coal plants in the country. The report detailed how as coal plants age, maintenance frequency and time increase.
Yallourn is 52 years old, while Loy Yang A will be 51 years old when AGL has scheduled it to retire in 2035.
The average lifetime of a coal powered plant in Australia is 29 years, according to Energy Networks Australia.
AGL told the Monitor fewer than one percent of coal plants are older than 50 years globally.
A former worker’s perspective: Tony Wolfe, who worked as a senior plant operator at Latrobe Valley’s Loy Yang coal power stations for more than 40 years, told the Monitor it’s the companies, not the government, that are pushing for the plant's closure.
“Loy Yang and Yallourn are becoming more unreliable the longer they go on, and they’re going to need significant investment to keep them operating past their closure dates.”
Wolfe pointed to an incident where an air duct collapsed and fell from the ceiling at Yallourn last year as an example of the plant's unreliability and the increasing risk to workers.
“A quite large heavy piece of metal fell from the roof to the boiler basement - it’s just lucky it happened at night and nobody was around to be hit by that,” he said.
“The older they get, unless you're going to spend billions of dollars replacing all of those tubes, they're just going to get worse and worse, and go offline more often.”
How much to keep the coal burning? The Victorian government has confidential contracts with Energy Australia and AGL to keep Yallourn and Loy Yang A operating through to their closure dates in 2028 and 2035.
Senior Fellow of the Energy Program at Grattan Institute Tony Wood told the Monitor these contracts should be made transparent so the public knew how much taxpayer money was being used to subsidise burning coal.
“No one knows what those deals are - but given the companies have already decided to close the plants - if a government has decided it wants to keep them operating you can imagine which side of the negotiating table you would rather be on.”
AGL has previously said it is aware of One Nation's policy but has made no changes towards its plan of retiring the mine on schedule.
The company told the Monitor in a statement it is aiming to add 12GW of renewable energy and battery storage by the end of 2035 - enough to power roughly 15 million average Australian homes.