Australia's total primary energy consumption grew by 3.6 per cent per annum
between 1993/94 and 1997/98, while primary energy use in the electricity sector rose
by more than 5 per cent per year over the same period. Since 1993/94, brown coal has
strongly expanded its share in the fuel mix of the interconnected electricity markets of
Victoria, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, and South Australia. It
has become the primary fuel source for electricity generation, substituting for hydro,
natural gas and hard coal. At the national level, this has meant that the long-term trend
towards greater use of natural gas has stalled in favour of coal, especially brown coal.
Since Victoria's brown coal plants have relatively low thermal efficiencies, this
substitution has also had the effect of reducing the average thermal efficiency in the
power market to the levels of the late 1980s (IEA, 2001b).