Tamar Valley CCGT switches off on Tue 23rd July (after running for almost 7 weeks straight)

A short note on Wednesday morning 24th July to note one of our alerts (configured in the ‘Notifications’ widget within ez2view) triggered yesterday when the ‘TVCC201’ unit switched off just before midday:

Did not have time to note this yesterday, but briefly this morning (and with the advantage of ‘Next Day Public’ data for the unit), here’s a collage of two widgets in ez2view:

In this image we see:

1)  At the top we have the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget showing the solid span of operations, which:

(a)  Ran for almost 7 weeks:

i.  Commenced on 6th June 2024 … which we noted soon after in ‘Gas-fired generation running more strongly in TAS (and Tamar Valley CCGT for the first time) than it has over the past 5 years’.

ii.  Crossed through 11th July, which was when we marked 5 weeks of solid operations; and

iii.  Ended Tuesday 23rd July 2024, almost 40 days after the operations commenced.

(b)  We see that output was almost fully ‘flat out’ at its Maximum Capacity – driven by bidding at or below $0/MWh (i.e. the blue ranges).

2)  At the bottom we see a filtered view of ‘Generator Outages’ widget looking just at TAS gas-fired units.  This shows:

(a)  a Planned Outage was slated to commence (as at the 18:00 data update yesterday) at least as early as this Sunday 28th July

(b)  but note that the MT PASA DUID Availability data for days prior to Sunday is now stale (last updated for 18:00 on Saturday 20th July), so it’s possible this outage has commenced sooner.

3)  Indeed, not shown in the image above:

(a)   Accessing the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget we see that the plan has been (since about 25th June) that the unit would run until the end of July;

(b)  Pulling up the ‘Bid Table’ in the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget shown above, we see:

i.  The unit tripped offline yesterday; and

ii.  Then there was a rebid yesterday by Hydro Tasmania with ‘Change in outage schedule: TVCC201 & Tungatinah #2 + correct error +SLOW>180’ as rebid reason.

… so perhaps the plan changed slightly with the trip to start the outage earlier?

For the complete picture, here’s a view over the same time span of all gas-fired units in TAS:

Between all the units, there’s been a solid block of production from gas-fired generation (to cater for the cold-induced demand in the presence of low hydro levels and low wind) for at least the 60 days shown.