Belated record of a ‘1 in 20 years’ planned outage at Eraring Power Station that had all 4 units offline

In pulling together this article in November 2024 [LINK TO COME] we came across a curious time from October to November 2016 that saw all 4 Eraring units offline for an overlapped period of about 4 weeks.

My outsourced memory failed me with respect to what this was about, but thankfully we’ve been able to piece together the following (as a belated and back-dated article) …

A)  Reporting in the bids at the time

Here’s a snapshot of the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view, Time-Travelled back to October 2024 to look at the start of the period when the units were all offline.

Unfortunately there’s not much information in the bids that actually helps to explain why the coincident outages.

B)  Origin Reporting

Curiosity drove our team to delve further, and we found this ASX Announcement from Origin on 16th February 2017, when they were releasing their half-year results:

… this contained multiple references to ‘the planned outage for one in 20 year maintenance’.

This is also noted in the Annual Report for FY 2017:

C)  Other information

Other NEM Veterans (who have better memories than me) recall that the outage was required for the inspection/repair of the cooling water outlet common to all 4 units that takes cooling water out to Lake Macquarie.

Apparently it was known as a (or the) ‘glory hole’.