With Bayswater power station in the news recently (including yesterday’s article about BW04) it’s worth a short note to record this dip in system frequency on Wednesday afternoon 2nd October 2024:
This dip in frequency might have coincided with the drop in output captured in the ‘Notifcation’ (alert) message triggered by one of our copies of ez2view looking at the InitialMW data published just after 14:05 NEM time today:
Here’s a snapshot of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view for the 14:15 dispatch interval, filtered down to just the coal units, to highlight that this outage (which might be a brief one) was not planned in advance:
We see that BW02 is offline on a lengthy planned outage to get ready for summer, but the BW03 trip offline was unexpected.
Caution
A note of caution to readers … worth remembering that Hugh Saddler wrote ‘Power station ‘trips’ are normal, but blackouts are not’ some years ago. We sometimes write these short articles because a number of our clients recently have been asking us to help them understand how to use the ez2view to monitor coal unit outages.
1) Sometimes it’s easiest to do this by documenting events here on WattClarity
2) You’ll find a few articles now tagged with ‘frequency disruption’ (i.e. disruptions of different size, and severity!).
Here’s some higher resolution frequency charts – https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/m3kpuizmi8a95hqxp2v2v/ALs_te-T8vXXSyVH8lKqrIE?rlkey=2e168f7ybwbv7lasncsvoxopl&dl=0 – free to use how you like. I’m more curious about what happened at around 07:29:50 where there’s sudden rise in frequency.