Back on 3rd January 2024 I’d written ‘Two (of four) Major Rectification Outages at Yallourn performed. Have they improved plant performance (Part 1)?’, and in that had noted that:
1) YWPS1 had a major planned outage coming up, that was at that time:
(a) Starting 15th March 2024
(b) running 66 days
(c) through until 20th May 2024.
2) YWPS4 had a major planned outage coming up, that was at that time:
(a) Starting 24th August 2024
(b) running 55 days
(c) through until 19th October 2024.
3) With YWPS2 (Nov-Dec 2023) and YWPS3 (Aug-Oct 2023) having already had their ‘let’s improve the plant performance’ major outages completed in 2023.
Recently in an Executive Briefing to a client following delivery of GenInsights Quarterly Update for 2023 Q4, we were asked whether we’d seen performance improvements with respect to the Yallourn station after these plant improvement outages.
Where did that outage for YWPS1 go?
Following from the article above, I’d set some alerts in ez2view Notifications Widgets looking at the YWPS1 and YWPS4 units coming offline, with a view that (when they came offline) I’d be able to track what was happening and potentially write an updated article.
Even before that client question, I’d been wondering to myself where had that outage on YWPS1 gone, as I had been expecting it to start a couple weeks ago now (i.e. 15th March, as noted above). Remembering that planned outage schedules can change for a number of different reasons, it was more of an academic curiosity and I had not had time yet to look.
But the client question recently prompted me to open up the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view to have a quick look today:
With this widget filtered down just to show the coal units, then sorted by Region and DUID, the Yallourn units appear at the bottom of this list. We can see that:
1) YWPS3 had experienced a forced outage about a week ago;
2) YWPS4 is currently offline with a forced outage that looks like it’s slated to end soon;
3) But there’s no planned outages for the four units in the 4-week configured look-ahead period.
So wondering when the planned outage for YWPS1 was shifted, and when to, I delved deeper, via the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view with the MT PASA DUID Availability date, filtered down just to the YWPS1 unit as follows:
Remembering this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ to see ‘that other dimension of time’, we see that:
1) On 24th January the planned outage start date was pushed back by ~6 weeks; but then
2) More recently the planned start date was shifted forward a little to be 25th April 2024 (i.e. ANZAC Day).
More on that unit outage later, when it starts …
Also checking the major outage schedule for YWPS4
Whilst i had it opened, I flipped the filter to look at YWPS4 to see if there was any movement in outage schedule there as well … and there has been more recently:
As noted here, from 2nd March 2024 the planned outage has been pushed back a little further … now the schedule says to start on 4th October 2024. But there’s plenty of time between now and then, so will see how this unfolds.
Any change in performance for YWPS2 and YWPS3?
This is something I don’t have time to delve into today…
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