Silverton Wind Farm (also) back online near Broken Hill – Friday evening 1st November 2024

Yesterday morning we noted that ‘Broken Hill re-connected to the main grid (on temporary towers), overnight to Friday 1st November 2024 … a little earlier than expected’…

1)  … and pointed out that, whilst the Broken Hill Solar Farm had restarted on Friday morning 1st November 2024, the Silverton Wind Farm had not restarted at the time of the article

2)  assuming the wind resource was there, perhaps it could have even restarted earlier – sometime Thursday evening 31st October 2024

3)  one possible cause might be some sort of slight technical hitch there.

Yesterday afternoon our copies of ez2view did alert us to the restart of the STWF1 unit, just prior to the 16:40 dispatch interval (NEM time):

… but we did not note at the time.

So we’re doing so on Saturday 2nd November 2024 with an additional snapshot of the ‘Unit Dashboard’ widget in ez2view focused back 2 days from this point:

In the dispatch interval highlighted (i.e. 16:30) in the table, we see the unit was given a small Target, but the turbines were a little slower to get a start … it was not until the 16:35 dispatch interval that its actual Output ramped up (slightly lower than the Target).

Eagle eyes will spot some periods earlier in the day when the unit had some Availability, but 0MW Target – this was because it was being ‘constrained down’ by a several different constraint equations, with one of the primary culprits being the ‘N>>BDBU_970_051’ constraint equation:

1)  Which is related to an outage on the Bundey to Buronga (6F) 330kV line; and

2)   … which I’m surprised we’ve not written about before.