Over the weekend the pre-configured alerts for ‘coal unit on’ and ‘coal unit off’ that trigger in the ‘Notifications’ widget in ez2view alerted us that:
1) Eraring unit 1 returned to service on Saturday afternoon 24th August 2024
… the unit had been offline on a Forced Outage
2) Eraring unit 3 came offline on Sunday afternoon 25th August 2024, as captured here:
… so today I had a quick look.
(A) Eraring unit 3 outage was planned well in advance
Referring to the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view this afternoon, we see a broader picture for the 4 x Eraring units:
We see that:
1) The return to service for Eraring unit 1 on Saturday (following unplanned outage) followed on from the return to service of Eraring unit 2 a couple days earlier (that unit had also been offline for a forced outage);
2) But in contrast, we see the outage for Eraring unit 3:
(a) Was planned in advance
(b) Is a lengthy one … with expected return to service not until 10th November 2024 (76 days away)!
(B) But no other outages (yet?) planned for other units
Given that it was only 23rd May 2024 (i.e. three months ago) that the decision was confirmed to extend the service life of Eraring station out until ‘at least’ August 2027, I wondered what plans had been made for planned outages for the Eraring units through 2026 and into 2027.
Thankfully with the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view (looking at the MT PASA DUID Availability data, but filtered to just the Eraring station) we get a very rich view:
Remember that this widget allows the user to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to review ‘that other dimension of time’
As noted on the image, from the currently expected return to service date for ER03 through until the (new) closure date mooted for the station (August 2027) there’s no other outages currently planned.
1) I would surprised if that does not change in the coming months as the generator works through their plans to ensure the optimal unit performance through until the eventual closure.
2) Maybe they’ll wait until they see what’s there, when they open ER03 up in this outage?
3) As a further note (with reference to this later article) see how ER02 and ER04 both had lengthy planned outages through the 12 months to 30th June 2024.
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