Yesterday afternoon (Friday 7th November 2025) we saw something strange in our display of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget from ez2view with respect to the Waratah BESS, as a result of which:
1) We posted the article ‘What’s up with Waratah BESS (unplanned outage till 3rd May 2026)?’;
2) Following from which we started conversations with a range of different people – including:
(a) Some people we know at Akaysha Energy, the owner/operator of the battery;
(b) But also with a range of other knowledgeable NEM (and battery) stakeholders we though might help us answer some of the questions that data posed for us.
From these conversations came more information (and some more questions as well), as a result of which we’re publishing a few more articles* separately to follow on. This is one of those articles.
* There are several reasons for there being separate articles, including:
1) Because the 4pm (NEM time) newsletter for today has already triggered, so we wanted to ensure that our readers are aware of these additional pieces of information … hence the discrete articles
2) But it’s also likely that it will be useful to link directly into some of them at different points in time.
3) Later yesterday, as part of this process, we published ‘An updated longer term trend (and tabulation) of operations at Waratah BESS’, and in the updated chart and table highlighted the period in mid-October 2025 when the Waratah BESS briefly discharged (and charged) at its full Maximum Capacity.
Today, I thought it might be informative to have a look at a 9-day time-range to midnight ending Saturday 18th October 2025 via the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view.
… there were a few things to see in that data, which go some way to helping answer the questions we have, so we shared as ‘A quick look at (plant-related) rebids for Waratah BESS to 19th October 2025 (during Hold Point 5 testing for full discharge)’.
So it was logical, then, to advance the Time-Travel clock in ez2view, and reset the look-back to 20 days, in order to produce the equivalent artefact below for the structure of bids and operations since the beginning of Sunday 19th October 2025 through until Friday evening 7th November 2025:
As we can see in the chart, most relevant to our current questions:
1) the PASA Availability has been consistently 350MW:
(a) of the unit since the Hold Point 5 tests were completed in mid-October has been constant at 350MW;
(b) which (it’s not a coincidence) is the level of SIPS provision that was enabled by TransGrid from 17:58 (NEM time) on 1st August 2025.
2) but it also seems to suggest that, following the testing at Hold Point 5, other steps are to be taken to enable the unit to operate at higher capacity than 350MW.
… in the exploration of information in the public domain that I’ve done (such as for this record) I’ve not found anything specific that might explain:
(a) What this is; or
(b) How long this might take (remembering that many earlier announcements were speaking of ‘end of the year’ for completion …and that’s fast approaching).
Perhaps one of our more learned readers can help us learn more?
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