Tarong North Power Station trips on Monday evening 19th August 2024

Reader Beware … just because you’re reading more about coal unit outages here in recent days, it does not necessarily mean that these outages are happening more frequently!

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Because I happened to notice it happen at the time, here’s a record of the email Notification triggered by one of our copies of ez2view this evening (at 18:20 on Monday 19th August 2024), showing that Tarong North power station has come offline from close to full load in the 5 minutes prior to this time:

Out of curiosity, here’s a snapshot of our live frequency reading for the mainland at 18:22 looking back 15 minutes, and clearly showing:

1)  the frequency dip coincident with the trip,

2)  but also the correction to be back within the NOFB …

i.  presumably by Contingency FCAS services

ii.  … along with Primary Frequency Response.

Finally, here’s a snapshot of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view for the 18:35 dispatch interval filtered down to just the coal units (noting some VIC units are over the page fold).

With respect to this view, we see both:

1)  Clearly that the unit does not have a planned outage in the immediate future:

… so we deduce that this unit outage is ‘out of the blue green’ (pardon the pun) and so is a forced outage, of duration unknown at this point

(a)  maybe it’s just tripped  … in which case it could be back online within a short space of time.

(b)  or maybe there’s some technical fault arisen, which might mean the unit needs to be off for a while to rectify.

(c)  either way, remember that Hugh Saddler wrote ‘power station trips are normal … ’ back in 2018.

2)  Perhaps not quite so obvious is:

(a)  how the unit’s availability in recent days (at 443MW) has been slightly lower than its Maximum Capacity (480MW)

(b)  but this is a little confusing to me, as 443MW was the number I had in my head as roughly what the capacity of the unit was, so would need to dig more thoroughly

i.  to see when (and potentially why) it’s capability was increased to 480MW

ii.  or perhaps to correct some mistaken understanding on my part.