Operational snags at Bayswater unit 2

We’d seen Bayswater unit 2 come offline this morning – as captured in this alert message from the ‘Notifications’ widget in ez2view triggered at 09:26 (NEM time):

… but could not help but thinking that we’ve seen the BW02 unit bounce around a bit in recent times.  So with a quick break at lunchtime we look at the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view at the 12:25 dispatch interval and see that:

1)  It’s only recently come back (on Saturday 18th January) from an earlier unplanned outage

2)  So to be off this morning (~3 days later) would not be part of the plan

3)  Indeed we see that today’s updated view of the MT PASA DUID Availability data shows this current unplanned outage potentially stretching out for a 2-week duration, to Wednesday 5th February 2025.  So I’m guessing that something significant is up!

Also in the AGL stable is the Loy Yang A4 unit, which has been running only part-load, and also has an unplanned outage flagged in the coming weeks.

Looking to see a bit more detail, we open up ‘Bids & Offers’ widget and filter down to look at just BW02 unit … but also ‘zoom out’ to show the most recent ~9 months worth of ‘as dispatched’ (concatenated) bids for BW02.

Over this time-frame we can see:

1)  An unplanned outage in July 2024

2)  A lengthy planned outage running from September to December 2024.

(a)  see below for evidence that this was planned.

(b)  I’d also seen:

i.  On 11th November 2024 AGL published ‘AGL Macquarie’s Bayswater power station outage complete’ (but this was to do with respect to BW04 not BW02, and I can’t find any release from AGL about the longer outage at BW02).

ii.  On 28th Nov 2024 Downer published ‘Major maintenance overhaul ensures power station ready for summer’;

iii.  and this Youtube clip titled ‘Downer delivers major maintenance overhaul of AGL’s Bayswater Power Station’ about this outage.

3)  Since coming back to service, the unit’s been challenged – with three separate unplanned outages:

(a)  The unit from 12th Dec to 22nd Dec 2024.

(b)  The unit was then off from 2nd Jan to 18th Jan 2025

(c)  Leading to the outage that commenced this morning, Tuesday 21st January 2025 – with a rebid reason on 20th January referencing ‘boiler issue’.

Out of curiosity we filtered the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view down to just BW02 and extended to look at the three years of successive MT PASA DUID Availability data sets:

Remember this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.  In this case, we can clearly see the difference in these 5 outages.