A quick look at Mortlake Unit 2 outage

No time today to delve into detail, but a few phone calls and messages prompted a quick look at Mortlake unit 2 outage which began yesterday morning.

Here’s what Origin showed in their bidding behaviour for the plant (seen via “Bids & Offers” widget in ez2view):

… and here’s “Forecast Convergence” widget in ez2view showing Available Generation:

Each row in this grid is a different MT PASA run (most recent at the top), with the red slice (i.e. low Available generation) centered on mid-September (i.e. traditional outage period).  What’s not visible currently is any sustained drop that might result as a result of a 283MW Mortlake unit being out for a longer period – but it’s early days…

With Loy Yang A2 unit out on extended outage, there are obviously some nervous people watching the supply/demand balance in Victoria stretching into the coming summer 2019-20. However I have not looked in detail to see what might be seen in terms of what might be a tight summer/demand period

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As a brief PS to this rushed note Tuesday afternoon, here’s three articles I came across that might be of interest to readers, also from 9th July:

1)   Kim Ho writes in “Major explosion at Mortlake Power Station” in Energy Magazine mentioned talk about a 6-month repair time, with damage possibly including to the turbine.

2)  Nick Evans writes in the Australian “Origin Energy plays down outage fears after Victorian power station blast” with not much detail available (and then in “Summer power shortage fears after generator explodes” on 10th July noting Origin taking about ‘5 months to fix’ with a return date of December 20th targeted by Origin)

3)  Zach Hope and Yan Zhuang write in “Mortlake Power Station could be at half capacity for months” in the Age that the repair time would be ‘months’.

As time permits, we might come back to this in the next week or two to explore further.