Callide C3 unit suffers cooling tower issues

I’d seen the unit come offline (Monday 31st October) but had not invested time to take a closer look – but then I see the ABC news article ‘’Structural failure’ at Callide Power Station near Biloela leaves unit offline’ whilst working on other things:

2022-11-01-ABCnews-StructuralFailure

The authors of this article write:

‘But CS Energy, which operates the C Unit in a 50-50 joint venture with InterGen Australia, said the “health and safety of CS Energy’s people is its highest priority”.

“The Callide C [joint venture] has advised the market that Unit C3 will return to service on [November 21],” the spokesperson said.

“The return-to-service date is based on the information that the [joint venture] has available at this point in time and may be subject to further change.”’

 

So this has prompted me to take a quick look using a couple widgets in ez2view that were recently enhanced in the v9.5 upgrade:

 

(A)  Information in the bid

Here’s a snapshot looking back 7 days in our ‘Bids & Offers’ widget within the ez2view software:

2022-11-02-at-13-30-ez2view-BidsandOffers-CPP3

As we can see, this was the third trip at the unit in under a week.

 

(B)  Current Return-to-Service expectation

The article from the ABC was published yesterday afternoon, so I wondered if there had already been any movement on the return-to-service expectation.

Attached is a view of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget as at the 13:40 dispatch interval (NEM time) this afternoon, showing it’s still expected to be be back online by 22nd November at this point:

2022-11-02-at-13-40-ez2view-GeneratorOutages

As it turns out, we also see Callide B2 also offline at present after tripping yesterday afternoon.


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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