More changes to the (re)commissioning schedule for Callide C4

Earlier this week, one of our team members wondered, via our internal Slack messaging, whether WattClarity was one of the ‘eagle-eyed energy experts’ that CS Energy was referring to in this LinkedIn update:

Whilst definitely not taking staking a claim to that title (e.g. please don’t call us ‘experts’ … we’re just seeking to understand as much as we can), I thought it would be useful to share an updated snapshot this evening from the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view, which readers here will recall we commonly have focused on coal units, as a sub-set of all the Scheduled* units it can focus on.

* alas not Semi-Scheduled units, because the AEMC has not seen fit to eliminate that aspect of invisibility.

There’s a few things to note here:

1)  We can see that the Callide C4 unit is operational currently (i.e. we can see the return to service for Tuesday 10th September following the brief outage noted in this article on Friday 6th September);

2)  But what’s particularly interested me is:

(a)  What seems like a longer period of only partial availability than I recall seeing before;

(b)  And the Unit State submitted by the Generator being ‘extended planned deratings’.

I’ve not looked at recent days of bidding this evening, but did quickly open up the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view – filtered down to just the CPP_4 unit and zoomed in to just look a few weeks into the future:

Frequent readers here will remember this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.

I’ve marked on the image the time at which we’d posted ‘Callide C4 offline again, as planned–but outage extended. Have they found something?’ two weeks ago today.  That’s a useful comparison point to see a longer duration of availability expected to be at ~210MW (i.e. in the green colour scale) out for the next couple of weeks.

Again, note that I’ve not had time to look into the bidding, but it’s useful for readers to reflect on the complexity of the process.   As CS Energy noted above:

‘As Unit C4 and its cooling tower have been completely rebuilt, we are following a similar process for a new generating unit as part of the recommissioning process.

This involves a series of performance tests where the unit is ramped up and down to ensure it meets the required performance standard, and deliberately being taken offline before safely restarting.’

Let’s hope for its safe travels…