Eraring Unit 2 offline for ~13 days, with tube leak

Eraring unit 2 came offline prior to 21:46 NEM time on Sunday evening 8th December 2024 as captured in this alert triggered by the ‘Notifications’ widget in ez2view at the time:

Briefly, about this outage

Utilising the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view, filtered down to focus only on coal units (and with YWPS2,3&4 under the fold) we see the following as at the 13:00 dispatch interval (NEM time) on Monday 9th December 2024:

Note that:

1)  The ER02 looks set to be offline until Saturday 21st December 2024 for an ‘Unplanned Forced Outage’;

2)  But that it’s not the only coal unit showing red boxes after the ‘today’ columns:

(a)  We also see an unplanned forced outage of GSTONE5;

(b)  Kogan Creek is offline (on Unplanned Forced Outage) currently, and might not be back until Sunday 15th December (noting that it’s stale data before then, so some uncertainty about that)

(c)  We also see that Millmerran unit 2 is flagging an unplanned forced outage in the (hopefully) low demand period just before Christmas.

… looks like it’s been bumped backwards a week in the more recent updates of the MT PASA DUID Availability data.

Utilising the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view filtered to Eraring Unit 2, we see the rebid reasons talking about a ‘tube leak’ … which is presumably the reason why it’s come offline:

More generally speaking

We’re gearing up to start crunching the numbers (from 1st January 2025, after the calendar year has elapsed) for the completion of he GSD2024 … endeavoring to release this as soon as possible after Australia Day 2025.

We’ll be interested to see what’s revealed in that longer-term statistical view, as it certainly seems to be the case that we’ve written a few articles about Eraring unit outages since the notification of delay to closure noted on 23rd May 2024.

… are the Eraring developments just one more illustration of the the challenges we’re facing in this energy transition:

1)  Prudence, and proper risk management, revealed that we could not (yet) manage without the energy (and the ‘Keeping the Lights on Services’) that Eraring can deliver at times; but

2)  Operationally, is the station increasingly challenged?