I’d first seen the news in this update by Steve Jackson on LinkedIn … though readers should note that it is Wellington North Solar Farm, not Wellington Solar Farm, that’s the unit that is affected (an easy mistake to make):
So I thought I’d have a look, to see what’s visible in the market data … here’s a view of the ‘Unit Dashboard’ widget from ez2view as at Sunday 7th December 2025:
Briefly, from this data we can see:
1) It was in the 13:15 dispatch interval (NEM time) on Saturday 6th December 2025 that the unit appears to have tripped offline following the fire.
2) Prior to the 14:00 dispatch interval (NEM time):
(a) the unit’s Availability in the ST PASA time was set to 0MW for the week ahead
i. and there’s not been any change on that since that time
ii. unfortunately availability of Semi-Scheduled units in MT PASA DUID Availability is invisible (due to what seems to be a myopic decision at AEMC in response to the ERM Rule Change a few years ago). So we can’t really see what the generator is thinking, in terms of return to service.
(b) interestingly (at least for NEM junkies like me):
i. the units availability in bidding does not have appeared to have been set by a change to bidding of MaxAvail
ii. but rather by reducing LOCL and ELAV each to 0, which then feeds through ASEFS into a UIGF of 0MW.
iii. what they have done, however, is stopped their auto-bidder (with last bid received at the AEMO at 13:57 (NEM time) on Saturday 6th December 2025.
Reporting elsewhere?
Briefly, in reporting we’ve seen elsewhere to this point.
Reporting from LightsourceBP?
No news release yet here from LightsourceBP, the generator.
In the Media?
In the process of posting this article, we saw that Perry Williams had written ‘Major solar farm on fire amid heatwave’ in the Australian, for those who have access:
It would help the average non electricity espért to understand this article if you spelled out what the many acronyms stand for and what they mean , in layman’s terms please ?