Notable forced outage at Yallourn Unit 2 … due to ‘LP turbine issue’

Earlier, I noted ‘Several coal units offline (on Wednesday 27th August 2025) with unplanned outages’.

One particularly notable one (at least for me) was the forced outage that began yesterday afternoon at Yallourn Unit 2 (Tuesday 26th August 2025).  Now with the benefit of ‘next day public’ data we can see the following in the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view:

2025-08-27-at-08-40-ez2view-BidsOffers-YWPS2

We can see that there are two particularly relevant rebids:

1)  At 13:37 (NEM time) a rebid was received at the AEMO advising of the Unit Trip; and then

2)  At 14:36 (59 minutes later) a second rebid was received that shifted the availability of the  unit out into the PASA timeframe with a rebid that speaks ominously about ‘LP turbine issue’.

In the snapshot of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in the earlier article, we can see that the return to service date is currently slated to be Thursday 11th September 2025 (i.e. two weeks from tomorrow).  However:

1)  It might be that EnergyAustralia needs to lift the cover of the turbine to assess what the issues is;

2)  If that is the case, then I would expect that that return to service date might change a bit once the cover lift has been done and the extent of the damage is assessed

 

Adding in the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view, we take a look at a couple different sets of PASA Availability data, as follows:

1)  In the first snapshot we look (forwards a week) in the PD/ST PASA data sets, which are a recent addition to market transparency (thanks for that!), filtered down to the YWPS2 unit:

2025-08-27-at-09-20-ez2view-ForecastConvergence-YWPS2-STPASA

Remember that the ‘Grid View’ of this widget allows users to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to see ‘that other dimension of time’ …

In this snapshot we see the outage first registered in the data set AEMO published for 15:00 – with the outage extending out past a week.

2)  In the second snapshot we step forward into the MT PASA DUID Availability data set (thanks to ERM for the ERM Rule Change!) and have to zoom in right to the top of the grid to see just the more recent runs:

2025-08-27-at-09-25-ez2view-ForecastConvergence-YWPS2-MTPASA

Note that there’s a planned outage that’s been slated for the period 20th Sept 2025 to 27th Sept 2025 for some time … it might be that the forced outage merges into this planned outage once the extend of the problem (or damage?) is known.

 

 

Information available elsewhere?

I’ve had a quick look this morning in places that might contain additional information – but can’t see any, at this point.

Note that:

1)  this update on Facebook seems unrelated (something to do with Monday evening 25th August 2025).

2)  there was an (unplanned?) distribution network outage in the local area yesterday … but that was probably unrelated as well.


About the Author

Paul McArdle
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.

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