This is one of the newest coal power stations confirming their inability to provide reliable power as the temperature increases.
"The vulnerability of Australia’s ageing and increasingly intermittent coal fleet was highlighted again on Thursday, when a unit of the newly purchased Loy Yang B brown coal generator in the Latrobe Valley failed in the midst of another heatwave, sending prices soaring.
The sudden outage of the Loy Yang B unit is the 13th failure of a major coal unit this summer.
The 1100MW Loy Yang B, which generates close to 20 per cent of Victoria’s energy needs, is owned by Alinta Energy, which bought it from Engie just last year for $1.1 billion – a sale that was only finalised on Monday this week.
It is also one of the youngest plants in Australia’s coal power fleet, and is expected to run for another 20 years after AGL Energy’s Liddell plant closes.
But Thursday’s unexplained outage of Loy Yang B caused the near instant loss of 530MW of capacity, and sent prices soaring in Victoria (to more than $12,900MWh) and South Australia, to a peak of $14,600/MWh.
Analysts at the Energy Transition Hub in Melbourne estimate this added $160 million to the cost of wholesale electricity. Prices jumped to a lesser extent in NSW, Queensland, and Tasmania.
The failure will be if particular concern to AEMO, which has already warned on repeated occasions that the biggest danger to grid supplies is the unexpected failure of a large fossil fuel generator, now a regular occurrence in extreme heat."
