Possible Fire at Reece Power Station – units out of service

One of our readers contacted us today about what appears to be a fire at (or near) the Reece Power Station on the west coast of Tasmania.

The ABC Emergency site had this alert that:

• Appears to have been created on Sunday evening 3rd August 2025; and
• Updated on Monday 4th August (yesterday) late in the morning.

Capturing an image for ease of reference:

(Some of) what’s visible, in the AEMO market data?

Now, Reece is a 2 x unit hydro station, so I’ve used v9.12 of ez2view to take a quick look at each of the units.

Reece Unit 1 … offline till Friday evening 8th August 2025

Here’s a snapshot looking backwards 7 days and (now with the added benefit of new data from the AEMO) looking forwards 7 days:

See two notes on this image, not repeated in text here.

Reece Unit 2 … tripped earlier, and offline till 16th September 2025

Here’s a similar snapshot for the sibling unit, Reece 2 … showing two key differences:

Note:

1)  Looking into the future, we see there’s no return to service expectation (currently!) shown within the coming 7 day period.

2)  Additionally, the ‘unit trip’ rebid for this unit was received by the AEMO at 19:39 (with an Event time of 19:38:33) whereas the same for REECE1 had an Event Time of 20:43:45 (i.e. almost an hour later).

Indeed, a reference to the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view (which looks at the MT PASA DUID Availability data set and has not yet been upgraded to also include this new data set) shows the unit expected return to service out at 16th September 2025 (42 days away):

So it does beg the question … what happened onsite?

Broader implications for the TAS region

It’s no doubt a combination of these new forced outages, and the planned outage at Poatina (plus probably other factors) that has led to AEMO forecasts now declaring forecast LOR1 in Tasmania for Thursday morning 8th August 2025:

Remember that this ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget allows the user to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.  With the widget on the right (being Availability in PD/ST PASA for the Reece unit) the full grid is not there because the data did not exist a full week ago.

Any updates at Hydro Tasmania?

On the Hydro Tasmania website, at the time of publishing I can’t see any news updates here about this.

A quick check on social media:

1)  They don’t seem to be active on Twitter since late 2023.

2)  No posts on LinkedIn about this.

…  And have not looked further