On waking up this morning I noted this ez2view ‘Notifications’ alert telling me that Vales Point 6 unit started coming back online overnight:
In real time the only data that’s visible in the ‘public’ data set, with respect to unit output, is the SCADA snapshot at the start of each dispatch interval … which we refer to as ‘Initial MW’. So this alert is saying hat the unit was at 0MW at 02:25 and had ramped up to 6MW by the SCADA snapshot at ~02:30 … presumably on its way further upwards.
The past 7 days, via ‘Bids & Offers’ widget
In order to see more, I’ve opened up the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view and filtered down to just the VP6 unit, looking back 7 days:
Eagle eyes will have spotted the fact that there’s no bids shown for the VP6 unit from the 02:30 start time this morning through until the 04:00 end of yesterday’s Market Day:
1) This relates to what we suspect is a bug in the AEMO’s internal systems when new units appear, such as WELNSF1 and CROOKWF3 from 00:00 this morning (we’re working this through with the AEMO under GR case ref #6723);
2) A useful point to remind readers that issues like this (i.e. a delay to publishing ‘yesterday’s bids’ such as in this case) should be updated, when they occur, on our Status Page here:
A quick look at the ‘Generator Outages’ widget
Last Saturday 18th May we’d written ‘Both Eraring 2 and Vales Point 6 will be offline for a few more days’ noting that the outage plans for Vales Point would be offline till Thursday 23rd May 2024 (i.e. in 2 days time). So it was a welcome surprise to see the unit restart commence this morning.
That prompts me to open up the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view (my copy is filtered to just look at coal units, but can look at any Scheduled unit … unfortunately not for Semi-Scheduled unit because of a deficiency in this ERM Rule change) and have a look at what’s shown there with respect to Vales Point 6:
With respect to the numbered annotations:
1) The highlighted three columns show various data with respect to the current Market Day
… headline is that the unit’s back online.
2) We see that the unit tripped offline on Friday 17th May 2024, so its availability for Sat 18th may was 0MW for the whole day
3) We see (in the ‘stale’ MT PASA DUID Availability data published for 18:00 on Sat 18th May) that the unit was not forecast to be back until Thursday 23rd May.
4) There’s a blank column for yesterday’s Market Day because of the AEMO bug (Case #6723) we are still working to resolve with them
5) In other good news, we see that the unit availability is forecast to be back to the full 660MW
… so presumably Delta Electricity has used the outage to fix whatever the issues were with the Primary Air Fans (PA Fans) that was noted here.
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