Start date of short notice outage at ER03 delayed again, now Friday 3rd October 2025

Yesterday morning (Thursday 25th September 2025) highlighted how ‘The start of the unplanned outage at ER03 is delayed till early Saturday morning 27th September 2025’ …

1)  With this appearing to be the primary reason why AEMO cancelled the expected Direction for System Strength in NSW

2)  Which is quite topical, given re-surfaced questions in the AFR about possible deferral of looming closure in 2027.

This afternoon (Friday 26th September 2025) we now see that an update to the the new PDPASA/STPASA data published (which went live from 31st July 2025) that Origin Energy has again pushed back the expected start-date of the outage – now not forecast to start until the early hours of next Friday 3rd October 2025:

Again, this view comes from the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view (at the 13:15 dispatch interval)

… which, as noted before allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to see ‘that other dimension of time’.

With all these movements in the short-notice outage, curiosity prompts me to open the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in order to track back through the ‘Bid Table’ in ez2view in order to understand what the ultimate reason is for needing an outage in the first place.

Seems that:

1)  there is some issue with one of the two ID Fans for the unit (i.e. induced draught (or draft)),

2)  which would be the reason the unit is running at half load (i.e. relying only on the other ID Fan to maintain negative pressure in the boiler).

So will need to ‘watch this space’ a bit more, to see when the unit actually comes off…