Flooded Yallourn turns Victoria to an importer

The flooding, this week, of coal supplies at Yallourn Power station (as reported here in the Age) – plus the reference to NEM-Watch in the Channel Ten news in Melbourne on Thursday night (seen here, at least currently) prompted us to have a brief look at what had happened:

Using the NEM-Review historical analysis package, we can see how Yallourn output was significantly curtailed from Tuesday afternoon onwards as each of 3 units were progressively withdrawn from service.

Trend of Yallourn Power Station Output after the flooding of its coal supplies

It was not until the following day that power prices pushed noticeably upwards, though – and then only to a very minor degree due to the large surplus of generation capacity in Victoria, and also elsewhere around the NEM.

The following chart (from NEM-Review) shows output of Victorian stations aggregated by fuel type – illustrating how Victoria reversed its normal position (as an exporter of electricity) to import electricity from neighbouring regions.

Stacked trend of Victorian power station output coincident with floods at Yallourn.

This afternoon, we see a similar story in the NEM-Watch real-time dashboard:

A view of the National Electricity Market at 14:15 (NEM time)

For a more detailed view of what’s currently happening within the Victorian region, we refer to the ez2viewAustralia (trader’s dashboard) to see how Yallourn output is still restricted to low load at one unit, and the wind is still in the doldrums:

A more detailed view of what's happening currently in the VIC region, as seen through ez2view


About the Author

Paul McArdle
One of three founders of Global-Roam back in 2000, Paul has been CEO of the company since that time. As an author on WattClarity, Paul's focus has been to help make the electricity market more understandable.

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