Most readers here will remember the 2022 Energy Crisis … and that poor coal unit performance (at that time) was one factor contributing to that event.
… for instance, you might recall we wrote about ‘Unavailability of coal units hits 24% across calendar 2022’ at the end of 2022.
Some readers will recall that the Yallourn units were amongst the units affected, which flowed through to EnergyAustralia performance – and that, as a result, the company initiated a schedule of planned outages with a focus of
1) One of the subscribers to our* GenInsights Quarterly Update series has asked us to keep an eye on this outage process, and particularly the performance afterwards
* as with prior iterations of this report, these are a collaborative effort between us at Global-Roam Pty Ltd and the team at Greenview Strategic Consulting. That’s what we mean here by ‘our’.
2) So it’s convenient for us to reference these outages via articles collated here on WattClarity to provide placeholders for further discussion. In amongst that group was the article ‘Where’s that major planned outage for YWPS1 go?’ which noted that:
(a) The outage had been planned to commence on 15th March 2024;
(b) But the outage had been pushed back to now for reasons we did not explore.
YWPS1 outage underway
This article can serve as a short record that the unit came offline, as per the updated plan, overnight last night – as captured in the ‘coal unit offline’ Notification/Alert in ez2view:
Opening up the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view, and filtering down to the YWPS1 unit, we see the unit’s run-down profile:
Looking a little deeper (with the ‘MT PASA DUID Availability’ widget in ez2view), we see the following:
At present, the expected return to service is on Tuesday 2nd July 2024 … which would make this outage a (pretty lengthy) 68 days in duration.
YWPS4 outage pushed back a little
In this note on 22nd March 2024 we saw that the planned outage for YWPS4 was (at that time):
1) Starting 24th August 2024
2) running 55 days
3) through until 19th October 2024.
But now, checking the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view, we see that the outage plan for this unit has changed, with:
1) A longer outage that’s currently:
(a) planned to commence Monday 11th November 2024; and
(b) planned to end with RTS on Monday 13th January 2025
(c) so now 63 days (slightly longer than planned earlier);
2) With also a shorter outage in August 2024 … presumably for things that can’t wait until November.
‘Looking up that vertical’ across the entire 3-year historical range in the grid, we see that the dates for the outage have moved around a fair number of times, so there’s nothing particularly alarming about the most recent changes.
Any changes in performance?
Something to be explored via our GenInsights Quarterly Update series.
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