AGL Macquarie’s Bayswater power station completed a $13 million outage on Saturday, and enough power for over 500,000 households has been returned to the New South Wales electricity network in time for the high demand summer period.

Unit Four* at Bayswater was offline from 26 September 2014 for routine maintenance and repair. It was returned to service and successfully synchronised with the electricity grid on 8 November 2014.

General Manager, AGL Macquarie, Scott Thomas said he was very pleased with the outage, and that the project was completed on schedule and on budget.

“Bayswater power station is now back at full capacity, and our employee and contractor workforce has done a great job,” Mr Thomas said.

Bayswater is AGL’s largest power station and is critical for the reliable and secure supply of electricity to residential and business customers and industry in NSW.

To ensure power stations like Bayswater are operating efficiently and to prevent unexpected breakdown, they need scheduled routine maintenance. 

“It’s like a grease and oil change for your car, only on a very large industrial scale,” said Mr Thomas.

An outage like this is also a substantial economic boost for the Upper Hunter.

“We employ around 300 people at Bayswater, but during the last six weeks we have effectively doubled our workforce, with over 300 contractors working 24/7 to get the job done,” Mr Thomas said.

The scope of work during the outage included:

• boiler inspection and repairs
• an overhaul of turbine values and steam feed pumps
• air heater maintenance
• replacement of chain and flight bars from the boiler ash removal system.

Outages at AGL Macquarie have a strong safety focus. The key safety focus for the Bayswater Unit Four outage was hand safety awareness, with employee education sessions held as part of the work schedule.

“Safety is our first priority, and we want everyone to finish the day at work as healthy and well as they started,” Mr Thomas said.

The completion of the Bayswater Unit Four outage has finished a long run of overhaul work at AGL Macquarie that started with an eight week outage on Liddell power station’s Unit One and a 10 day outage on Bayswater’s Unit One.

AGL Macquarie is now ready for the coming summer months of traditionally higher electricity demand.

* Power stations like Bayswater are built with separate generating units. Each unit runs autonomously and can be taken offline for maintenance without any impact on the operation or output from the remainder of the power station.

About AGL
AGL is one of Australia's leading integrated energy companies and largest ASX listed owner, operator and developer of renewable energy generation in the country. Drawing on over 175 years of experience, AGL operates retail and merchant energy businesses, power generation assets and an upstream gas portfolio. AGL has one of Australia's largest retail energy and dual fuel customer bases. AGL has a diverse power generation portfolio including base, peaking and intermediate generation plants, spread across traditional thermal generation as well as renewable sources including hydro, wind, landfill gas and biomass. AGL is taking action toward creating a sustainable energy future for our investors, communities and customers.