For those (like me*) who are tracking with interest what’s been happening with Callide C4, it was with interest that I saw the latest update from part-owner CS Energy yesterday (i.e. Thursday 9th Feb) on LinkedIn:
* see the expanding series of articles we’re collating here on WattClarity about the initial explosion and wider impact on the electricity market, and now the repair and return to service schedule.
(A) The repair process
The news of the arrival of the replacement stator (one of the high cost components needed to complete the repair) was also published as ‘New C4 generator stator completes its road journey’ on the CS Energy website also on Thursday 9th February 2023. This followed earlier news (noted here on 20th December 2022) about the earlier arrival of the replacement generator transformer.
(B) Expected Return to Service data remains 3rd May 2023
In order to check out whether there’s been any further change in the expected return to service (i.e. subsequent to this note on 29th December highlighting the RTS date pushed back to 1st May 2023) I took the opportunity to test out an upgrade to the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget that we’re building for the upcoming ez2view v9.6 release… which enables the user to filter the MT PASA DUID Availability data set (with eternal thanks for the ERM Rule Change) to look at a user-configurable group of fully* Scheduled units
* as noted before, alas no plant (technical) availability data for Semi-Scheduled units at this point.
Here’s a view:
Remembering that this widget allows the user to ‘look up a vertical’ to explore ‘that other dimension of time’, we can see the different times over this 21-month (and counting) repair process the expected return-to-service date has been adjusted. Not all that many times, given such a complicated repair … though we’re getting to the pointy end now.
Current expectations remain as noted in December that Return to Service is expected to be 1st May 2023 … still with the same stepped profile:
Step 1) Only 300MW at 1st May 2023
Step 2) Then to 350MW at 1st June
Step 3) Then to 420MW at 1st August
Step 4) Then to 466MW at 1st October 2023
… remembering the question I asked in December 2022 about the increase beyond the current Maximum Capacity of Unit 4:
(a) the Max Capacity of Unit 4 is currently only 420MW;
(b) Whereas the Max Capacity of Unit 3 was increased to 466MW in October 2020;
(c) Which is probably a useful point to remind readers about this prior note about how ‘capacity ain’t capacity’.
We’re looking forward to having ez2view v9.6 released (and to seeing CPP_4 back up and running).
(C) Still no word on Cause of Failure?
In that article on 20th December, I noted that there was no word about the finalisation and release of the ‘cause of initial failure’ report … which had been tasked to Dr Sean Brady.
… I noted that Mark Ludlow had subsequently written ‘Still no answer to ‘catastrophic failure’ at Callide power station’ in the AFR on 26th January 2023.
As I hit ‘publish’ here a couple weeks after Mark’s article, I still have not seen anything on that front.
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