A quick article for Friday 6th September 2024 with respect to Callide C4 and what I termed before the ‘never ending story’ that might not quite be over, yet.
Callide C4 offline … planned outage extended
As captured in this alert from the ez2view ‘Notifications’ widget at 17:51 on Thursday 5th September 2024 noting that the unit had come offline as planned.
Here’s a snapshot from the the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view at 18:00 today (Friday 6th September 2024) with the rows for Callide C highlighted:
In the snapshot of this widget posted on 30th August in the article ‘Return to service commences for Callide C4 on Friday 30th August 2024 (after 1193 days offline)!’, we saw three short planned outages (i.e. grey cells) mixed in between some days of output – as part of the commissioning process.
In the snapshot above we see three red cells marked as ‘Unplanned Forced Outage’ in the three intervening days … Saturday 8th September, Sunday 9th September and Monday 10th September 2024.
1) I wonder what’s happened?
2) A quick check of the ‘Latest News’ section on the CS Energy website shows nothing about this.
3) For those playing along with their own copies of ez2view :
(a) here’s the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget (with ‘Next Day Public’ data till yesterday) that shows the current picture. Some rebids reference ‘turbine mechanical’, but that could just be meaning some test procedure on the turbine:
(b) you could take a further look tomorrow (with data for today) to see if anything’s visible there?
Callide C3 tripped, and returned to service
Also worth noting that the ez2view ‘Notifications’ widget from ez2view captured the Callide C3 unit tripped this morning just prior to 06:40:
The unit returned to service this afternoon just prior to 14:05:
Because it was back online at the time of the snapshot from the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view shown above (i.e. offline and back on in the same Market Day), it appears as fully green in the ‘today’ columns.
“The Callide Unit C4 incident was the result of the simultaneous failure of key electrical equipment and system back-ups in a complex series of events that could not have been anticipated, with some of the contributing factors being traced back to the original design of the power station,” Mr Busine said.
What is the total cost $50M on coverup, maybe $500M on rebuild because the Insurance has refused a payment all because CS Energy allowed maintenance staff to switch off the critical 220V battery with the C4 Turbine in service.
The C4 operator in the central control room did not know that the 220 battery had been isolated.
CS Energy’s Ltd Callide C4 Management allowed maintenance staff to isolate the critical 220V DC Battery supply with the C4 unit in Service without informing the unit C4 operator who was in control. He was left with his control panel switched off.
Process Safety proceedure had been removed by CS Energy’s management’s lack of knowledge or understanding
A critical insurance payment has been lost as it is impossible to insure against a lack of knowledge or understanding and behaviour that shows a lack of good sense of judgement.
Technical Writer gobbledygook has been used to try and hide what happened