One news item that spiked my attention this morning was Colin Packham’s article ‘EnergyAustralia plagued by Tallawarra B gas station delays’ published in the Australian Sunday evening 9th July 2024:
The article is well worth reading, for those who have access.
I’d not specifically noted the (lack of) performance of this asset in articles previously (though we had noted the glitch in AEMO systems that occurred in relation to the unit hitting AEMO’s production systems). So I quickly opened up the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget inside of ez2view this morning to quickly view the past 270 days of bidding and dispatch for the unit:
Some notable dates:
1) The unit was registered in AEMO’s production systems on 10th October 2023;
2) In this article published 19th December 2023 ‘EnergyAustralia completes successful test fire of new gas power station’;
3) On 24th January 2024 we saw ‘First output at Tallawarra B’;
4) Not noted on the chart above, but useful to note that EnergyAustralia released the news item ‘EnergyAustralia opens Tallawarra B gas-fired power station’ on 19th February 2024;
5) Last period of non-zero availability in bids was 16th April 2024;
6) Which means the unit was not bid available during the period of volatility leading to Administered Pricing commencing on Wednesday 8th May 2024.
7) Last Friday 7th June in this Operations Update, EnergyAustralia says:
‘Tallawarra B, EnergyAustralia’s new gas-peaking power station, is awaiting release’
When we use the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view, it’s most commonly focused on the coal units – but here’s the alternative view of the widget focused on gas-fired units, with the NSW units at the top of the table, and TALWB1 highlighted:
Note the unit is currently slated to be operational from Saturday 22nd June 2024.
To gain some sense of how firm that date might be, I quickly opened up the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view and filtered down to the ‘TALWB1’ DUID and, after zooming in somewhat to reduce the initial 3-year view, see the following:
Remember that this widget allows the user to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to see ‘that other dimension of time’.
So we can see that the expected operations date (slated currently for 22nd June) has been pushed back a number of times in the past.
We’ll aim to keep an eye on this one…
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