Unplanned outage at YWPS3 (tube leak) extended (due to air duct collapse)

This morning I’ve noticed the article ‘Collapse at Yallourn Power Station leaves unit offline for weeks’ by Daniel Kutchel in ABC News from yesterday, relating to Yallourn unit 3.  I’ve highlighted this excerpt:

‘Power station operator EnergyAustralia said in a statement an air duct in unit three collapsed during maintenance, detaching from the boiler end and falling to the floor.

No-one was injured and WorkSafe was notified.

EnergyAustralia said it expected the unit to be offline for at least two weeks and it was investigating the incident “to ensure the integrity of similar equipment”.’

So I thought I would have a quick look, via a few widgets inside of ez2view as at Tuesday 10 June 2025

 

Visibility within ez2view

I’ve chosen to start with this snapshot of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in the 10:00 dispatch interval (NEM time):

2025-06-10-at-10-00-ez2view-GeneratorOutages

The headlines in this widget show that:

1)  YWPS3 is expected to be offline until Saturday 28th June 2025, which is just under 3 weeks away.

2)  There’s also an unplanned outage running on YWPS4, but the return to service expectation there is sooner.

 

Now skipping through to the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view, we can see a bit more…

2025-06-10-at-10-05-ez2view-Bidsoffers-YWPS3

Specifically:

1)  We see that:

(a)  the unit was originally reporting a ‘suspect tube leak’ in the early hours of Tuesday 3rd June 2025 (a week ago)

(b)  the tube leak was confirmed, and appears to be the reason the unit came offline

(c)  there’s not been any rebid yet to reference the air duct issues (noting visibility of only ‘next day public’ data)

2)  The unit came offline around the middle of the day on Saturday 7th June 2025.

 

Finally, we’ve included here a snapshot of the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget looking at successive MT PASA DUID Availability data updates for the YWPS3:

2025-06-10-at-10-20-ez2view-ForecastConvergence-YWPS3

From here we can see:

1)  Remember that this widget…

(a)  Allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’;

(b)  In this case, the data set chosen (i.e. daily peak availability from MT PASA DUID Availability for the YWPS3) spans 3 years back and 3 years forwards

(c)  But I’ve zoomed into only the most recent sets of data to limit the time horizon

2)  From this we can see that the unit outage was only extended in the AEMO data from the 09:00 data set yesterday (Monday 9th June 2025) …

(a)  which is presumably soon after the collapse happened

i.  So earlier on Monday

ii.  Or perhaps Sunday, or even Saturday evening) (noting the absence of updates of this AEMO data set every Sunday)

(b)  and ties in with the ABC News article.

 

Anything else from EnergyAustralia?

Note that:

1)  The AEMO data above originally comes from EnergyAustralia;

2)  And the ABC article notes ‘a statement’ that they refer to

 

Nevertheless, I thought I would have a quick look to see if I could find more.

1)  Alas, nothing on their website that I could see:

(a)  Not on their blog or media pages

(b)  And, interestingly, it looks like they’ve stopped publishing these ‘Operations Updates’.

2)  Additionally, it does not look like anything anywhere I looked on social media:

(a)  Not here on LinkedIn

(b)  No updates on Twitter since 2023


About the Author

Paul McArdle
Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients. Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.

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