With plenty of news articles about the ‘end of coal’ in the UK this week, it was with interest that I coincidentally noticed this update from Len McLachlan (the GM of Bayswater-Liddell power stations for AGL via LinkedIn:
Len wrote:
“The process of two-shifting, which involves taking a unit offline and bringing it back online within a twelve-hour period, was executed with remarkable precision on Unit #4.
Our team desynchronized 20 seconds ahead of the 10am target and resynchronized within 50 seconds of the 3pm target.”
Using these timings and the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view, it was pretty quick to narrow down to this period on Saturday 7th September 2024 that matched the specifications:
Flexibility like this in the coal fleet will assist the assets continue for a while longer … until we’ve collectively facilitated the entrance of sufficient replacement ‘Keeping the Lights on Services’.
As we’ve written before … ‘Are we *still* not building enough replacement Firming Capacity?’.
It would be very interesting to know what the CO2 emissions reductions were throughout this process.
This is how you wreck a base load power station which is at the end of its designed life.