What will fill the hole left by coal?

 Latrobe Valley power worker Greg Dunn.
 ‘I love the fact that I generate electricity,’ he says. 

Greg Dunn, coffee in hand, has just finished a 12-hour night shift at the Hazelwood power station. He is tired, but in his low-key way, he is resigned, too. He rattles off the members of his family who have worked in the electricity industry in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, a list that almost certainly will end with him.

Dunn’s father worked as a boilermaker in the valley. His grandfather worked here too, back in gentler days when electricity was thought an essential service for governments to run. In the valley, it was the state electricity commission (SEC).

“My mother’s father, he was a rigger in the SEC,” says Dunn. “Three of my uncles worked for the SEC. My mother worked for the SEC in the front office, that’s where she met my father.”

Dunn is 47. His life, like thousands of people in towns throughout the valley east of Melbourne, has been defined by an accident of nature – beneath the earth lies one of the world’s largest deposits of brown coal.

He grew up in the SEC town of Yallourn, with planned streets, swimming pool and art deco cinema, the pride of the valley until it was decided that it should be demolished to dig up the coal beneath the houses. The town was gone by 1983. Dunn is resigned to something similar happening to valley towns like Morwell, Traralgon, Moe and Churchill, if not physically, then slowly, and perhaps more painfully.

Read the story by Gay Alcorn and Kate Stanton on The Guardian - “What will fill the hole left by coal?”