Four coal unit outages in the past 24 hours
It does not happen often, so when receiving 4 different ‘coal unit off’ alerts within 24 hours, we thought we would take a look …
unit trip
Kogan Creek returned to service on Tuesday 20th December 2022
CS Energy’s Kogan Creek restarted on the morning of Tuesday 20th December 2022.
What’s going on at the Callide power stations?
Prompted by a few media questions (on a day when all 4 units were offline together for about 3 hours), have taken a quick look at the status of the four units on the Callide Power Station site.
Callide C3 unit suffers cooling tower issues
Alerted via an ABC news article, we take a quick look at Callide C3.
Simultaneous trip of Gladstone units 3 and 4 on Thursday 31st March 2022
A short article, noting trip of Gladstone units 3 and 4 this afternoon.
Tarong unit 2 trips on Tuesday afternoon (1st February 2022)
Adding into the tight supply-demand dynamic, the coal-fired unit Tarong unit 2 tripped this afternoon.
Both units trip at Callide C on Wednesday 13th January 2021
A pretty rare event in the NEM, when two units trip simultaneously … so a short article on WattClarity as a result.
Liddell unit 3 out till perhaps March 2021 after transformer incident (serious injury to one person)
The publication by AGL Energy of the short note about the transformer incident (and injured worker) at Liddell unit 3 yesterday prompted me to have a quick look, following on from the volatility this week.
Price spikes in NSW and QLD on the first afternoon of December
Earlier this afternoon we were alerted to a price spike in NSW and QLD that was seemingly caused by a unit trip at one of the larger generators in NSW.
Case Study part 1 – Queensland price spikes to $15,000/MWh at 09:45 on Tuesday 13th October 2020 … coincident with many Large Solar Farms (tripping**)
Alerted to a price spike at 09:45 this morning in the QLD region, we discovered some reduction in load (spot-exposed Demand Response probably) and also a large collective trip in Solar Farm output (reasons unclear).
Case Study of 03:10 on Saturday 28th September 2013 (aggregate Raw Off-Target +331MW for Semi-Scheduled units)
Third case study today – and last one looking back at 2013. This one is a bit more complex than the first two.
Case Study of 12:35 on Wednesday 14th August 2013 (aggregate Raw Off-Target +391MW for Semi-Scheduled units)
Like was the case on 4th July 2013, the cause of this large Aggregate Raw Off-Target result (across all Semi-Scheduled Generators) was a single unit trip.
Case Study of 14:55 on Thursday 4th July 2013 (>300MW Aggregate Raw Off-Target across all Semi-Scheduled Units)
Does not take long to see why this particular dispatch interval was one of the few dispatch intervals (before 2019!) flagged in our top-down analysis of aggregate Raw Off-Target across all Semi-Scheduled units in the NEM….
Kogan Creek trip on 9th October 2019 delivers highest ‘aggregate Raw Off-Target’ for the 2019 year for ‘all Coal’
Following on from Tuesday’s main article (summarising results across 105,120 dispatch intervals through 2019 for ‘all Coal’ and ‘all Wind’ groupings), this is the first of 4 x Case Studies that look at each of the extremes in outcome. This one is the dispatch interval featuring the greatest over-performance, collectively, across all coal units through 2019.
Four units trip in Victoria on Easter Saturday
A quick look at Saturday 11th April (Easter Saturday) where there were major reductions in output at 4 units across Victoria – 3 coal units in the Latrobe Valley and the Macarthur Wind Farm out in western Victoria, probably related.
A further look at Thursday Jan 30th
Guest author, Allan O’Neil does a masterful job with limited time in reviewing some of the goings-on in the NEM (particularly VIC and SA) on Thursday 30th January 2020
Thursday 30th January 2020 sees demand reach 34,257MW and LOR2 notice issued for both VIC and SA
A brief overview of a stressful afternoon/evening in the NEM, where a confluence of events (heatwave-driven high demand, low wind, coal unit trip, etc…) drive LOR2 low reserve condition notice in both VIC and SA, and gear AEMO up to call on Reserve Trader (yet again!)
A quick look at Mortlake Unit 2 outage
A quick look after the unit trip (including reported explosion) at Mortlake Unit 2
Brief comment on the extended outage at Loy Yang A unit 2
Following the notice from AGL Energy on Friday last week about the extended outage occurring at Loy Yang A unit 2, here’s some initial thoughts via WattClarity (with more to come as time permits)
Five different aspects of assessing the “dependability” of coal-fired power (in the Generator Report Card)
The framework we used to analyse the extent to which coal-fired power is “dependable” in the Generator Report Card, and the extent to which it’s been changing.