The company's announcement that it had given the Australian Energy Market Operator the required three-and-a-half years' notice that it could close Eraring in 2025 caught the workers off guard.

"It's a shock that it's come so quickly. I've spoken to a few guys today and they've just said, 'I didn't expect it to be so soon,'" one Eraring employee told the Newcastle Herald.

He said most employees had an "inkling" the end was coming, but few predicted the plant could shut well before its previously scheduled closure in 2032.

"A lot of people on site considered that in a few years we'd go to AEMO saying we're looking at shutting one unit down then slowly transitioning over a few years. A lot of people had that 10-year strategy in their head.

"To have Origin come to us and say we've gone to AEMO with our legally binding requirement of three-and-a-half years' notice, the timeframe has come as a shock."

Eraring, the most powerful electricity plant in Australia, employs about 430 people on site, either directly as employees or as contractors.

Origin and the NSW government vowed to help staff retrain and find new work, but the employee who spoke to the Herald said the transition would be "challenging", especially for those "institutionalised in this place".

"It's probably not such an issue for the younger guys in their 30s, but some of the elder guys within our station, in their mid-40s and 50s, they're all of a sudden going to be looking at hitting the market in three years.

"It's not a fantastic time to go looking for a job in a market that's not there.

"Our skills aren't that transportable outside of heavy industry, and heavy industry is on the decline."

The closure of AGL's Liddell plant next year will deposit a large group of workers with a similar skill set into the Hunter jobs market.

"There's another group of guys who are in exactly the same boat as us," the Eraring employee said.

"It'd be nice if we had some kind of transitional board that was facilitating this whole process, because we're not the only power station that's about to go through this dynamic change.

"If we were to look at what happened in Victoria when they shut down there, that was a nightmare."

Hazelwood power station in Victoria's Latrobe Valley shut in 2018, costing an estimated 750 direct and 300 indirect jobs.

Lake Macquarie MP Greg Piper said NSW governments had been asleep at the wheel.

"Sadly, successive governments and indeed many in the community have spent too much time arguing the facts about climate change and wind turbines to realise how quickly world energy markets were changing and shifting away from fossil fuels." he said.

"We're now starting our transition from way behind where we should have been."

He agreed the government should set up a transition authority to manage the impacts on the community.

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