Reece Unit 1 returns to service after outage (coincident with fire onsite) … but Unit 2 outage lengthens

On Tuesday we noted about the ‘Possible Fire at Reece Power Station – units out of service’.

Curiosity (mixed with powering up with ez2view again after a ~5 week break) prompted me to configure a ‘Notification’ alert looking for restart of either of the two units at Reece Power Station.  This triggered early Friday evening 8th August 2025 as seen in this snapshot:

… so this morning I thought I might look a bit further, with AEMO data and elsewhere…

 

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

Again, let’s start with 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 from the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget at the 11:45 dispatch interval NEM time, looking backwards 7 days and (now with the added benefit of new data from the AEMO) looking forwards 7 days:

We can see that the unit’s now fully back online, and expected to remain fully available in the PD/ST PASA availability data that’s newly being published by AEMO as a market transparency/efficiency initiative.

So whatever (if any) effect the fire had onsite with respect to this unit was short-lived.

Curiosity made me open up the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget (snapshot at 11:55), using the ‘PD-ST PASA’ tab to take advantage of the new data from the AEMO as follows:

Quick notes about this image:

1)  Remember that this widget allows the user to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.

2)  Notwithstanding a glitch in this new data set that AEMO is aware of and working to rectify:

(a)  There was an initial period following the unit trip through until the PD-ST PASA run for 08:00 on Monday 4th August where the outage was of more unknown length;

(b)  But from the 09:00 run on Monday 4th August, there was a high degree of consistency in the expectation that the unit would be available from the half-hour ending 16:30 (Friday evening 8th August 2025);

i.  Which was what we noted in Tuesday’s article; and

ii.  Which aligns well with the unit commencing output in the 5-minute period to 17:51 yesterday evening (Friday evening 8th August 2025).

Reece Unit 2 … outage extended till 8th Nov 2025 (partial return)

Here’s a similar snapshot from the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget at the 11:45 dispatch interval NEM time, looking backwards 7 days and (now with the added benefit of new data from the AEMO) looking forwards 7 days:

In this case, we see that there’s no sign of unit availability in the 7-day horizon offered by this data here.

So again we’ll take a look at the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget, initially sticking with the ‘PD+ST PASA’ tab as follows:

So we need to step to the ‘MT PASA’ tab to take advantage of the MT PASA DUID Availability data set and see further into the future as follows:

Given that the time horizon shown here is backwards ~3 years and forwards ~3 years, we need to zoom in at the top to see the area of interest:

In this case we see that:

1)  Since the outage in the data there have been three steps in the expected (partial) return to service:

(a)  Initially to 2nd September 2025

(b)  Then (in the run date for 12:00 on Monday 4th August) out till 16th September 2025

… this is what was mentioned in our article on Tuesday afternoon.

(c)  And now (in the run date for 18:00 on Tuesday 5th August) the forced outage pushed out further, for a partial return to service of 8th November 2025.

2)  Noting only partial availability of 80MW out until 2nd April 2027!

So it would seem that something significant has happened onsite with respect to the second unit?

A short-lived ‘forecast LOR1’ for the TAS region

In Tuesday’s article we noticed the forecast LOR1 in Tasmania for Thursday morning 8th August 2025.  But (again using the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget) we see that this was short-lived in forecasts, and were rescinded before they reached dispatch (i.e. the top diagonal):

 

Any updates elsewhere?

Worth checking again elsewhere, to see if there was news about what happened …

1)  With respect to Hydro Tasmania:

(a)  Nothing in the News Updates section

(b)  Also noting I saw on Social Media (again, no longer active on Twitter since late 2023, and no posts on LinkedIn about this).

2)  In a quick span of the Mainstream Media, I did not see anything