We’ve already collated a number of articles with respect to the long unplanned outage at Waratah BESS:
- Which (we later deduced) began over the weekend Friday 17th October 2025 to Monday 20th October 2025 at the end of some final commissioning testing.
- But which the broader market did not become aware of after Friday 7th November 2025
- first, following our article ‘What’s up with Waratah BESS (unplanned outage till 3rd May 2026)?’
- which prompted Angela MacDonald-Smith to do some investigations over the weekend, leading to ‘Angela’s article in AFR answers some of our “What’s up with Waratah BESS?” question’.
Recent changes in the Market Data
So it’s probably worthwhile to note that there’s been some recent changes in AEMO market data with respect to the long partial outage for the WTAHB1 unit.
In the ‘Generator Outages’ widget
Firstly, in the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view this morning (Wednesday 14th January 2026 at 07:35 NEM time) we noticed a change to the long run of ‘red zeros’ that had extended out to May 2026:
What to make of the change is perhaps a little tricky, given how the AER requests that participants report SIPS derating in MT PASA (as discussed in this earlier article). Without checking with anyone else (so warning, may be incorrect!) …
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- my first guess is that the participant (Akaysha Energy) might be planning some testing on the 3rd transformer
- i.e. not the one that’s been operational for many months supplying a portion of WTAHB1 to SIPS;
- and not the one that suffered catastrophic failure;
- but rather the 3rd transformer that was taken offline for testing soon after the failure of its sibling.
- and that this testing might span Sunday 25th January 2026 to Saturday 31st January 2026.
- my first guess is that the participant (Akaysha Energy) might be planning some testing on the 3rd transformer
So that’s something we might watch … and (time permitting) write about here.
In the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget
In order to answer the ‘when was this (hypothesised) testing first planned?’ question, we utilise the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view at 08:00 NEM time to show the following:
As noted on the image, the change in the AEMO data was made in the reporting update for 18:00 yesterday (Tuesday 13th January 2026). So updated by the participant to AEMO somewhere in between 15:00 and 18:00 yesterday.
Reporting elsewhere?
It’s worth briefly noting that, as I hit publish (at 08:15 on ) that:
- I don’t see any news update on the Akaysha website; and
- I’ve not had time to look elsewhere…
PS1 on Thursday morning 15th January 2026
On Thursday morning 15th January 2026 we posted ‘No, it looks like the entry for Waratah BESS was a Data Entry Error?’:
So youre speculating that the transformer will come online then?
Because that’s not testing, testing would have already been done offline. Soaking for a second time and then taking load is proving.
Noting that, on Thursday morning 15th January 2026 we posted ‘No, it looks like the entry for Waratah BESS was a Data Entry Error?’