Most NEM stakeholders will be aware that Eraring Power Station’s been given an extended lease on life less than a week ago. But from an operations point of view, it seems it’s one step forwards and one step backwards recently.
Eraring unit 2 back online
We wrote how ‘Eraring Unit 2 makes it back online, Saturday evening 25th May 2024’ (remembering how Eraring units being offline was one of the factors contributing to the unexpected outcomes on Wednesday 8th May 2024).
For a very brief period (under 48 hours) it was nice to see no unplanned outages for the Eraring units on the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view.
… but Eraring unit 1 offline
However that’s now changed with Eraring unit 1 coming offline overnight, as captured in this snapshot from the ‘Notifications’ widget alert in ez2view:
So let’s quickly look further…
‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view
This morning when I look at the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view (filtered down, as I usually do, to just coal units), I see the following:
Noting that the other two Yallourn units are under the scroll at the bottom, it’s worth noting the following:
About Eraring Unit 1
With respected to the numbered annotations:
1) The cell for yesterday (Monday 27th May 2024) shows the maximum availability bid for the unit on that Market Day, so the trip yesterday evening does not show.
2) The three cells for today show the unit has been offline for the day thus far … but was not expected to be offline
3) These three cells show the ‘stale’ MT PASA DUID Availability data, which was published for 18:00 on Saturday 25th May 2024 (i.e. when the unit was expected to be available).
4) These two cells, covering Sunday 2nd June 2024 and Monday 3rd June 2024:
(a) show the unit’s now expected to be unavailable on those days
(b) also indicate that Origin Energy knew that the unit would be coming offline for a week long outage yesterday prior to the 18:00 data update yesterday
5) The unit’s currently anticipated to be back online sometime Tuesday 4th June 2024.
About other coal units highlighted
With respect to the other rows highlighted:
1) There’s a short-notice outage for Bayswater unit 3 that has been on the board for a few days, and will start before the weekend.
2) There’s also been a short-notice outage for Mt Piper 1 that’s been on the board for a few days, and has been anticipated to commence in the next ~24 hours
3) As noted with these ‘Callide C updates’, counting down the days till the return of C4.
4) This outage today for Gladstone unit 6 could well be for economic and not physical reasons, seeing recent history
5) A rare unplanned outage today for Stanwell unit 2 (back online at 10:35 same day).
‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view
Flipping to the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view (filtered down just to ER01 unit), I see the following:
We see that (beginning 11:39 yesterday) a series of rebids relating to the Economiser for the unit … presumably after which they found the tube leak and took the unit offline.
And single digit wind output in NSW for over an hour since 15.00 hours.
If there is no wind it doesn’t matter how many wind farms there are, there is no wind.
Economiser leaks are lots of fun! By the time they show up as wet ash in the ash hoppers the high pressure feedwater has usually cut adjacent (finned) tubes. If you don’t spot it early and shut down then the cut tubes fail and the leak gets really big, really quickly seen as a big feed flow / steam flow split. Hopefully it is an accessible spot (economisers are usually jam packed, multi layer locations) or it will be cut your way in and weld your way out. Somewhere there will be a boiler Engineer about to have a very busy weekend sorting this out.