Worth a short note this morning starting with this emailed alert received yesterday at 16:55 (Wednesday evening 21st August 2024) noting that Callide C3 unit had begun to return to service:
A recap on recent history
Probably worth a recap:
1) The long outage (518 days offline)
(a) Frequent readers here will recall that we’ve collated plenty of articles here of how the Callide C3 unit came offline on 31st October 2022 as a result of a cooling tower failure (which had the result of also prolonging the already lengthy outage of the sibling unit Callide C4).
(b) On 1st April 2024, Callide C3 returned to service after 518 days offline
2) More recent, shorter outage:
(a) Once online, the unit then ran through 2024 Q2.
(b) Unfortunately we saw that the unit came offline Friday 26th July 2024 (almost 4 weeks ago).
(c) On 31st July we wrote ‘Callide C3 offline until expected return to service on Monday 26th August 2024’.
(d) In the 3 weeks since 31st July, the return to service expectation had been steady at Monday next week.
3) For those not following too closely, note that it’s a different unit than Callide C4 (the one that blew up)!
Yesterday’s (earlier) return to service
So we see that the return to service yesterday evening was ~4 days earlier than what the expectation was.
Out of curiosity, I’ve added this snapshot from the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view to show the return-to-service profile, and progressive adjustment of rebids, showing the unit’s up almost at full load:
… and here’s a snapshot of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget to highlight how the ‘stale’ data (from the MT PASA DUID Availability run for 18:00 last Saturday 17th August) still persists:
It is time for a Royal Commission into what happened!
Was the critical 220VDC supply modified from original and who planned the process that allowed it to be turned off, with the C4 unit in service.
The C4 unit control room operator did not know that the 220VDC was switched off.
Why the need for a coverup, the fancy SC employed by CS Energy, commissioned the so called enquiry to avoid public disclosure of what really happened.
CS Energy should be given to Snowy Hydro
What is the total cost including increase cost of supply to the grid of CS Energy failure?
For those not following too closely, note that it’s a different unit than Callide C4 (the one that blew up)!
Callide C3 is the same as C4 its 220VDC switching happened with the unit out of service.
C4 was wrecked by ignorance (which is a lack of knowledge)
Casstell Key interlocking has been used for over 100 years to avoid what happened to ensure that the critical 220VDC battery was always available to stop the turbine motoring.
Beleaguered state-owned CS Energy spent $38m of taxpayers’ money hiring lawyers over the past two years, including to fight the release of the landmark report into the company’s woes. The investigative report into the 2021 Callide C explosion compiled by forensic engineer Dr Sean Brady, cost taxpayers a further $10.4m.