The operator of Wollongong’s Tallawarra Power Station is investigating what caused a failure at the site last week.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The gas-fired plant, which began operating at Yallah in 2009, went offline on Friday.
The Energy Australia (EA) plant was generating 394 megawatts (MW) when its output suddenly dropped to zero about 2pm.
An EA spokeswoman said the power station’s continuous monitoring system “detected a potential fault and shut down the plant”.
“While we are currently investigating the root cause, our initial assessment didn’t identify any safety or plant concerns that required the plant to be kept offline,” she said.
The intermediate power station, which responds to changes in electricity demand, returned to service just over two hours later.
On Tuesday, Mark Ogge from the Australia Institute said the breakdown showed coal and gas plants couldn’t handle the heat.
The spokeswoman said EA assets were “designed and maintained to operate across a range of conditions including extreme heat”.
“The reality is almost all generation, thermal and renewable, is less efficient when it’s extremely hot,” she said.
A reported drop in output on December 25 was not a failure, she said, rather the plant being put “out of service” due to low market demand.
“Excluding planned outages, in the past 12 months Tallawarra has run at an average availability of more than 94 per cent,” the spokeswoman said.