It’s Wednesday evening 26th April 2023 and Liddell unit 2 has been trending downwards for a while, having just dropped under 100MW output.
I was going to wait until the end, but have other things to this evening do so am posting this early – see the current status in this snapshot from an ez2view window at 20:40 dispatch interval, composed of two copies of the ‘Unit Dashboard’ widget:
In a way you could say LD02 outlasts me this evening…
With respect to the two widgets:
1) the top one highlighting the declining (terminal) output from LD02:
(a) Which started wobbling a bit from around 08:00 this morning (potentially as it tries to manage declining coal availability in its unit bunkers); and
(b) Started slowly trending down from around 12:00
(c) More noticeably started to drop from ~16:45
(d) But is still to fully come offline.
2) the bottom one highlighting LD01, which is the last remaining unit to close (which is expected to be on Friday 28th April):
(a) Much more consistent output;
(b) But still (at ~320MW) well below its 550MW Maximum Capacity
(c) Which Allan showed has been the way of the world for Liddell for many months as it we suspect it has operated with lower boiler pressures to reduce the risk of causing boiler tube leaks.
Captured in the chart for LD02 at the top is the trace of NSW trading prices, which shows that the extra boost of revenue it will have earned from operating through the brief spike to $756.22/MWh at 17:55 this evening.
Sequence of closure
Here on WattClarity we’ve been collating a number of relevant articles under a ‘Closure of Liddell’ category. Amongst those articles are now three articles highlighting the closure of each of the units:
1) Those with longer memories will remember that the ball started rolling a little over a year with the closure of Liddell unit 3 on 1st April 2022.
2) More recently Linton noted how LD04 closed on Monday this week, 24th April 2023.
3) Today we have this article noting the closure of LD02 later on Wednesday 26th April 2023 than some of us were thinking.
4) Which means there’ll be an article on Friday sometime noting the closure of LD01.
PS1 not offline until 22:20
Turns out the unit was not fully offline until InitialMW for the 22:25 dispatch interval (i.e. metered at 22:20) as captured in that ez2view email alert from the ‘Notifications’ widget:
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