Loy Yang A2 slips back – now RTS on Thu 27th October 2022

Given that I had the ‘MT PASA DUID Availability’ widget open in ez2view to look at the recently extended outage for Kogan Creek, I thought I’d also use it to check out a couple of other long-term outages of major plant:

1)  Earlier today I took a look at how ‘Callide C4 still scheduled to RTS on 7th April 2023’.

2)  In this article we’ll have a quick look at Loy Yang A2.

(A)  Updates via WattClarity about Major Outages at Loy Yang A

There’s been a few series of articles about the Loy Yang A power station, which I have bundled together under these headings:

2019 extended outage

The unit tripped on Saturday 18th May 2019 as a result of an electrical short internal to the generator.

1)  This was discussed on 10th June 2019, and

2)  Then months later (on 20th December 2019).

3)  The unit returned to service on 24th December 2019

4)  … but the unit then ran into problems, as noted on 13th January 2020.

2022 extended outage

Lightning struck twice (metaphorically, but still quite unfortunately), with the same type of plant failure occurring earlier in 2022 and the plant coming offline WHEN.

1)  This outage I first wrote about on 4th May 2022, when I wrote that ‘Extended outage of Loy Yang A2 from 15th April 2022’.

In that article I noted the expected return to service was to be 1st August 2022… which is obviously since gone past.

2)  However the unit’s currently offline (I’ve not been checking its status) so I thought I would have more of a look, hence this second article in the series

Earlier closure … now 2035

On Thursday 29th September 2022 AGL announced it would bring forward the retirement date by about a decade to close by the end of the 2035 financial year.  Later in this summary article on WattClarity, we added in links to just some of the large amount of commentary we’ve come across via news media, from industry organisations and in a number of other sources.

To follow from this, on Sunday this week I started to explore the question ‘How much capacity would be required to replace Loy Yang A power station?’…. and there will probably be other articles to follow on this thread.

(B)  Data from ez2view

Using our ez2view software, we quickly have a look:

1)  Trend Widget

Using the ‘trends engine’ within the ez2view software (it’s also accessible in ez2view online) we quickly generate this trend of daily stats for Loy Yang A2 since the start of calendar 2022:

Readers should remember that:
(a)  Click on the image to open a larger resolution image.
(b)  Those with a licence to the software can click to open their own copy of this trend here.

I’ve highlighted on the image how the unit tripped on 15th April, was expected back by 1st August (as at 4th May) but is still not back on 12th October 2022.

2)  ‘MT PASA DUID Availability’ widget

Inside of the ‘MT PASA DUID Availability’ widget, we now see two important things:

1)  that the currently expected return to service date is 27th October 2022; and that

2)  the return to service expectations have been progressively slipping

See here:

I’ve tried to capture some of the slippage in this view list view, but might have missed some of the exact timing changes:

1)  As noted above the original RTS expectation was at 1st August 2022.

2)  In the AEMO data update for 09:00 on 10th June 2022 the RTS was pushed back by 8 weeks, to 25th September 2022

… through July and August there appear to have been no changes to schedule.

3)  In the AEMO data update for 18:00 on Monday 12th September 2022 the RTS was pushed back by another 3+ weeks, to Tuesday 18th October 2022

4)  In the AEMO data update for 18:00 on 7th October 2022 (Friday last week) the outage was extended for another week, with RTS pushed back by another 9 days to Thursday 27th October 2022

(C)  Any communication from AGL Energy?

Another obvious question (given the comparison earlier today in terms of what CS Energy had communicated for Kogan and Callide C4) is what AGL Energy might have communicated about these slippages?

I’ve no time today to look further, but might get a chance at some future point in time…