The over-optimism of project timelines in the NEM has been a theme of my WattClarity articles over the last few months. Whether it be for Snowy 2.0, Project Energy Connect, or a number of new wind and solar development projects that have been beset by delays.
With the return of Callide C4 eventuating a week and a half ago, I’m adding another one to that list.
As was well-publicised, the unit was part of a catastrophic explosion on the 25th of May 2021. Given the nature and extent of the damage, the repair timeline was highly uncertain (as we noted at the time) but a tentative return-to-service (RTS) date was initially marked for June 1st 2022 via the MTPASA unit availability process.
Coined by Paul as ‘the never-ending story‘, the unit’s return faced nine delays until it eventually came back online late last month in a partial capacity. Below I’ve charted these delays based on the MTPASA data, periodically submitted by CS Energy during the outage.
Forecast convergence of Callide C4’s expected return, compared against the actual number of days that the unit was offline.
Source: ez2view Generator Outages widget
The chart shows the countdown of days until the expected return date (as stated at each point in time), compared against the actual return timeline of 1,193 days.
Whilst the repair process (and estimating its length) would have been a very complex engineering task with many moving parts – its quite clear in hindsight at least, that expectations (even those, made part-way through the repair process) were consistently overly-optimistic.
Whilst the unit was brought back online in a partial capacity on the 30th of August, it has since been taken back offline (as was planned), but that outage has since been extended. The current MTPASA data indicates the unit is slated to return to full capacity this Sunday, the 15th of September.
So three years to procure a cooling tower rebuild, new; turbine, alternator, transformer, switchgear and associated electrical auxiliaries.
So I would call this 30% of a new unit, but like only 5~15% timeline of the full brownfield power station extension eg. the original building of C3C4, with the whole development approvals, environmental approvals etc…
So how does this factor in the “little bit optimistic” view that building a mature technology nuclear PS on a existing Brownfield site as “eh, I say we can do in a short 10 yrs eh??”.
Can we have a fact based deep dive into the topic of timeline of major infrastructure planning in the NEM please?
“The Callide Unit C4 incident was the result of the simultaneous failure of key electrical equipment and system back-ups in a complex series of events that could not have been anticipated, with some of the contributing factors being traced back to the original design of the power station,” Mr Busine said.
This is classic technical writer cover-up “gobbledygook”!
$50M is the cost of the legal advice and inquiry which was meant to be secret by claiming legal privilege after maintenance staff isolated the critical 220V battery supply with the C4 Turbine in service so the insurance was voided!
The C4 unit operator “who most likely now has PDSD” in the principal control room did not know that the 220V battery had been isolated, so the C4 Alternator motored to complete destruction!