We’ve just noted ‘Forecast tight supply-demand balance this evening upgraded to forecast LOR3 (i.e. load shedding) in NSW, Thursday 18th December 2025’.
It’s understandable that we want to focus in on several different aspects of the supply-demand balance, so in this article we’ll include two snapshots of ez2view widgets early on Thursday morning 18th December 2025 to highlight what’s expected with the NSW coal fleet.
First we have the ‘Generator Outages’ widget at the 06:10 dispatch interval (NEM time) to focus in on the broader story in the MT PASA DUID Availability data set:
Worth noting both:
1) In the filtered ‘Constraint Set’ widget Gantt chart at the top of the screen, at least we see no outages underway or planned for today/tomorrow on the 330kV lines supplying Sydney from the south.
… that’s a good thing!
2) Not so good news is that we see stories in 5 of the 12 x NSW coal units:
(a) Bayswater unit 2 has not yet returned from an unplanned outage … but at least this one is imminent.
(b) Bayswater unit 4 has been on the tail end of a very long planned outage, but missed its expected return to service date yesterday.
(c) Eraring unit 4 came offline recently for an unplanned outage
(d) Mt Piper 2 looks set to be available today … but has added an unplanned outage to the schedule for the Christmas period
(e) and Vales Point 5 has missed its earlier expected return to service date following a lengthy unplanned outage that began in August 2025 following ‘turbine vibrations’.
To look in more granular detail at today’s expectations, here’s the ‘PASA DUID Availability’ widget, filtered just for NSW coal and zoomed in to look at this evening:
With this we can see that there might be efforts being made by AGL with respect to Bayswater 2 to accelerate the return to service of that unit. The other 4 units look too far away.
Leave a comment