Four units at Gladstone still running … was it (is it) partly a game of bluff?

We’ve now posted three sequential articles dealing with the current Enterprise Bargaining (and mooted Industrial Action) at Gladstone Power Station:

1)  On Sunday we noted ‘All 6 coal units at Gladstone coincidentally out on unplanned outage this coming week?’

2)  On Monday we noted ‘About the Industrial Action at Gladstone Power Station (potentially) taking all units offline … and LOR forecast for QLD, VIC and SA’

3)  Yesterday, we noted ‘AEMO notes ‘Update to system strength requirements in North Queensland’ to cater for 0 x Gladstone units online’.

But noting no ez2view (‘Notification’ widget) alerts received overnight (i.e. for coal units coming offline) and looking at ez2view this morning (i.e. Wednesday 5th February 2025) there are still four units running at Gladstone.

Not that we’re saying that this is a bad thing from a supply-demand perspective (leaving aside the climate change and energy transition reasoning for a minute), but we are curious…

What’s in the AEMO Market Data?

Utilising the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view at the 08:40 dispatch interval (NEM time) and we see the following:

Note in particular:

1)  There was a period (on Thursday 30th January and Friday 31st January) when aggregate output was down to 440MW from 4 units), but availability offered in bids has increased since that time and output has ramped back up

2)  There’s also plenty of rebids including ‘protected industrial action’ as part of the rebid reason.

… I’ve not invested time to drill into any in particular.

Using the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view to look at the MT PASA DUID Availability data, we see the following:

In reality there’s not much here that we did not already know:

1)  Data for the remainder of the week has not been updated since 18:00 on Saturday 1st February (as we noted in article #1):

(a)  because of the structure of the

(b)  and I don’t have time to try to read tea leaves in ST PASA.

2)  But the good news is that the current data shows all 6 units available from Sunday 9th February onwards.

… as an aside, the current data shows 43 of 44 coal units expected to be available from Sunday 9th February onwards:

(a)  Only Eraring Unit 1 on an unplanned outage

(b)  And no planned outages for anyone.

What’s in Data published elsewhere?

Looking quickly at the CS Energy News site … there’s no update there about the industrial action (but there is something about this other thing).

There’s nothing new on the MEU QLD news site.

Bluff (or chicken) in the negotiation process?

With globally important games of bluff (or ‘chicken’) perhaps being played out on an international stage, is this another example of a bargaining process being played out?