It’s Friday morning 16th January 2026, which means that we now have access to the ‘next day public’ data sets that the AEMO published shortly after 04:00 NEM time this morning.

In this article we’ll take a first quick look at bidding and rebidding for the four Callide units, in order to see if they shed any light* on what the cause of the trips were.

* spoiler alert, alas nothing much to see in them…

To do this we use the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget from ez2view:

• time-travelled back to 04:00 this morning (i.e. the limit of what bid data is publicly accessible at this time)
• looking back 48 hours;
• showing the ‘Bid Table’
• and filtered to each unit in turn

So working backwards…

Callide C4

Readers here will recall that it was not that long ago that Callide C4 required to be substantially rebuilt following a turbo-alternator explosion.  So it’s understandable that there will be broader industry stakeholders nervous about what happened ~12 hours ago

… but just be sure to objectively review this event in its own right.

Here’s a window, with the relevant rebids highlighted:

Unfortunately not much to see there, in terms of the cause of the outage

Callide C3

Readers here will recall that Callide C3 had its own long outage (though not as long as C4) following cooling tower failure.  The same caveat hence applies to this one, as well:

In terms of highlights:

1)  Also not much to see there, in terms of the cause of the outage

2)  But it is worth noting that the return to service expectations were nominated three times (whereas only 2 times for C4 above);

(a)  the time between the 1st and 2nd nomination was not much at all.

(b)  the 3rd nomination at the bottom of the list (i.e. the one AEMO received at 20:08) fed into the delay to RTS out till Saturday evening we noted in this article yesterday.

(c)  we’ll come back to RTS expectations later in a subsequent article…

Callide B2

Remember that we’d noted a reduced availability for both B1 and B2 here following the trips.  We can see this in the trended Bid Stack for Callide B2 here:

One might hypothesise from this:

1)  The reduced availability:

(a)  appears not the result of any physical implication of whatever caused the C3 and C4 trip,

(b)  but rather (it appears) due to more mundane ‘mill limits’.

2)  But the reduction in availability would have contributed to the later spikes.

Callide B1

Here’s the older B1 unit:

A similar picture and story…

————————–

As a key take-away here, we’re still no clearer about whether the cause of the coincident trips

• was related to something onsite,
• or something outside the station gate in the network?
• or some 3rd factor I’ve not thought of…