Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients.
Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.
Following a week where several days saw price volatility in NSW (with this being so extreme that Reserve Trader was triggered on Thursday 17th December) we’ve taken a look at the comparative performance of coal units across the NEM (and particularly in NSW) compared to prior years.
A broader look at what the extended outage at Loy Yang A unit 2 seems to be having on the spot and financial markets into the future, via AEMO MT PASA data, and via the ASX Energy’s futures price data.
It’s fitting to book-end the week with a look at frequency performance overnight (into Saturday 31st May 2025) with two coal unit outages in NSW overnight to see what happened in terms of more ‘old style’ frequency disruption.
Amongst other things happening in the past 24 hours, the large Kogan Creek coal-fired power station in southern QLD came offline this morning in an outage that appears anticipated two days prior … but was not fully planned weeks in advance.
1 Commenton "A few stories in (coal) generator outages (at Wednesday 9th April 2025)"
Including Callide C3, that appears to show that the entire coal fleet of Australian generators had an equivalent forced outage rate, EFOR, of ~5% for the period in question.
Including Callide C3, that appears to show that the entire coal fleet of Australian generators had an equivalent forced outage rate, EFOR, of ~5% for the period in question.
Not a disaster, then?