Tamar Valley CCGT gets a run (late Monday 11th August 2025)

It does not happen all that often … has not happened since a run of activity from 13 June 2024 to Tue 23rd August 2024.

It was back at that time that we’d set a (filtered) ‘unit start’ alert in the ‘Notifications’ widget of ez2view with respect to the TVCC201 unit (i.e. the combined cycle unit at Tamar Valley), and had left it running since that time.  Yesterday evening (Monday 11th August 2025) that alert triggered at 21:21 (NEM time) for the first time since:

So this morning I thought I’d open up the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view to take this quick look:

With these new data sets now available in various ez2view widgets, we can see that the expectation is that the unit will be available out for the coming week – at least until Monday 18th August 2025.

To what extent has the outage on Reece Unit 2 contributed?

Yesterday, we wrote about how ‘Reece Unit 1 returns to service after outage (coincident with fire onsite) … but Unit 2 outage lengthens’.

I wondered about the extent to which the extended outage on Reece Unit 2 might have contributed.  So I opened up the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view to have a look – starting with the PD-ST PASA data:

Keep in mind that this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’

As noted on the image, it was the run date for 18:00 on Wednesday 6th August (i.e. after the unit had come offline – and also after (on 4th August) Hydro Tasmania had adjusted return to service expectations for both Reece units).

So we might be tempted to hypothesize that the Reece Unit 2 outage was part of the reason for the startup of Tamar Valley CCGT.

But to test this hypothesis I flipped to the ‘MT PASA’ tab to look at the longer-dated MT PASA DUID Availability data, and zoomed into the top of the grid:

As per the annotations, it appears that Hydro Tasmania had contemplated (in early July) giving the unit a run for a number of days (or at least making it available – so presumably it would have been intended to run).

1)  This did not eventuate

2)  But it does suggest that there must be other factors (also) at play in relation to the decision to switch Tamar Valley CCGT on overnight.

Long-run history of GPG in Tassie

Partly because we’d already pre-prepared this query in the ‘Trends Engine’ within ez2view, I thought it would also be useful to post an updated view of this long term trend of daily stats for the operation of all gas-powered generation in Tasmania, with Tamar Valley CCGT highlighted:

Those with a licence to the software can open up their own copy of this query here.

From this trend we can see how rare it is that the Tamar Valley combined cycle gets a run.  Obviously the small sliver of operations over the past ~12 hours is too small to be visible at this point, but we can clearly see that:

1)  Aside from the winter 2024 period of operations

2)  The Tamar Valley CCST had not operated since May 2019.

… so clearly noteworthy.