In our Brisbane office we have a number of very large screen displays, for the purposes of both:

• Watching the market, with a compilation of several screens showing many ez2view widgets; but also
• Some internal monitoring of ‘operations’ processes and other things used to serve our clients.

Amongst the ez2view widgets displayed is a copy of ‘Generator Outages’ widget stretched out to look past Christmas, and filtered to look at selected ‘big units’ (i.e. coal units plus some others).

It’s been particularly useful to keep an eye on any changes in the long unplanned outages on Vales Point 5 and Yallourn 2 … both with their own turbine issues.

However, I happen to look up now and see:

1)  The WTAHB1 unit is operational today, but

2)  In the MT PASA DUID Availability data set, there’s now an unplanned outage for Waratah BESS extending off the page.

Here’s a view in my copy … but remember that that I’ve not got as much screen size to work with, so I’m not looking out as far as our big screen display:

Yikes!

Looking more into the AEMO data

I can’t recall seeing that before, and wonder if I’d not been looking closely enough, of it it was a more recent change.   So I thought I would look more into the AEMO Market Data.

Investigating the MT PASA DUID Availability data

In order to ascertain the relevant changes in the MT PASA DUID Availability data set, we open up the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget and filter down to the WTAHB1 unit as follows:

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

There’s plenty of colour in this Grid view (using auto-colour to scale between 0MW (as red) and the MaxCap of 708MW (as blue).  A couple quick notes:

1)  The MT PASA DUID Availability data set currently extends 3 years into the future:

(a)  Though note that the draft report from the Nelson Review recommends extending that to 5 years;

(b)  In response to which we made some of our own suggestions.

2)  Because of the auto-scale on the Grid:

(a)  There are plenty of colours here

(b)  Scaled between red (i.e. 0MW available) and blue (i.e. 708MW, which is the peak availability in any cell in the grid, which is below the 850MW MaxCap of the unit).

(c)  But a predominant colour in the grid (the yellow-orange) is 150MW, which I am guessing is related to net (i.e. the SIPS-reduced) capacity actually available to the market?

The most immediate interest is in terms of the nearer-term outage, we’ll zoom in as indicated to focus on the next ~6 months as follows:

As noted in the comment on the image:

1)  There was an outage slated, out for over a week – to Sunday 16th November 2025;

2)  But (perhaps something happened overnight) because in this morning’s data update (i.e. for 09:00 NEM time on Thursday 7th November 2025), the outage had been extend

3)  But (even more alarmingly?!) in the data update for 12:00 NEM time, the outage now looks to be out until 3rd May 2026.

Not sure what is going on here?

What’s in the nearer term market data, though?

Given the disconcerting news (apparently?) in the MT PASA DUID Availability data, I thought I would look at some other the other (nearer term) data sets.

Using the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view, I have:

1)  Filtered to just the WTAHB1 unit ENERGY bids, and

2)  Set to look back 7 days and forward 7 days (including PASA Availability bids)

3)  And grouped the Bid Table underneath by Rebid Category, in order to highlight (the few!) Plant-related rebid reasons:

This reveals the following:

As noted on the image:

1)  From an availability point of view:

(a)  The unit has been, and is currently, available and operating

(b)  And, looking out 7 days in the PD-STPASA time range, both PASA Avail and MaxAvail in the bid are non-zero;

2)  Further, there are not many plant-related rebids over the past 7 days, and none really seem to suggest some reason for a long outage.

So this nearer-term view does not seem to provide any clues as to why a very long unplanned outage should appear in the MT PASA DUID Availability data set earlier today, and be further extended.

What am I missing?

Perhaps some more learned reader can help me?

Anything other information elsewhere?

The extension of the outage has just happened today, so I was not sure what I might see on the ‘Recent News’ section of the Akaysha Energy website … but there’s nothing there, at this point.

PS1 … SIPS might explain it

More coming soon…