Mt Piper unit 1 offline till Monday 24th June with boiler tube leak

Some readers might be wondering why the current forecast is that the NEM-wide IRPM might be lower this evening than it was yesterday evening (as noted earlier this morning).

One contributing factor will be that Mt Piper Unit 1 has come offline overnight, as captured here in this email alert from the ‘Notifications’ widget in ez2view:

2024-06-18-at-01-25-MP1-offline

As seen above, the unit was offline by 01:20 on Tuesday 18th June 2024.

Because this is before the 04:00 ‘end of Market Day’ timing, I expected to see some reason for the outage noted in the ‘next day public’ bid bands – which we can review with ‘Bids & Offers’ widget inside of  ez2view as shown here:

2024-06-18-at-11-55-ez2view-BidsOffers-MP1

Highlighted at the bottom (i.e. last bid or rebid we can see at this point) was the rebid received by AEMO at 21:12 referencing ‘boiler tube leak’ in the rebid reason.  Not shown here, but the ‘Bid Comparison’ function confirms that this was the rebid in which the generator made their intention known to take the unit offline overnight.

Now that ~12l hours have elapsed on Tuesday 18th June 2024, we can expect that more information from the generator about the expected date for return to service might now be visible in the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view as shown here:

2024-06-18-at-12-00-ez2view-GeneratorOutages-Coal

Because of the idiosyncrasies of the forward-looking MT PASA DUID Availability data set:

1)  Data for the next four days (i.e. Wed 19th, Thu 20th, Fri 21st and Sat 22nd June) won’t have been updated to reflect the recent unit change-of-state;

2)  However data from Sun 23rd June forwards has been today, and as such:

(a)  We see the unit availability set at 0MW for Sun 23rd June; and

(b)  We see the unit availability set at 720MW for Mon 24th June 2024.

… which indicates the current expectation of the generator is that the unit will be back online sometime Monday 24th June 2024.


About the Author

Paul McArdle
One of three founders of Global-Roam back in 2000, Paul has been CEO of the company since that time. As an author on WattClarity, Paul's focus has been to help make the electricity market more understandable.

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