In August 2021, one of the four 720 MW units at Eraring, Origin’s only coal fired power station, was taken offline for major maintenance, allowing us to inspect and repair its boilers, turbine and cooling water systems.
Maintenance outages involve complex planning by an integrated team who oversee the entire work program. This team develops a detailed scope for each job, which includes a full project schedule, cost allocation and resource planning.
During any outage, safety performance and quality management is a major focus. Add in a pandemic and this focus increases significantly, requiring additional planning and preparation to safely manage and accommodate a peak workforce of 600 people on site.
Against a backdrop of escalating COVID-19 cases in the NSW community, Origin’s maintenance outage team developed a comprehensive pandemic management plan, focused on protecting the health of employees, contractors, and the community.
This plan required outage work teams to follow strict hygiene controls, which saw them separated into 83 work ‘bubbles’ to minimise unnecessary interactions and comply, where possible, with social distancing guidelines.
Over the course of the maintenance outage, 700 site inductions were completed to safely onboard workers and almost 9,000 Rapid Antigen Tests and 150 on-site PCR tests were conducted. Additionally, 50 temporary accommodation and amenities blocks were assembled on the Eraring site to help accommodate the largely local maintenance workforce and reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission.
Throughout the three-month outage, broader site safety remained a focus, with more than 2,600 safety observations recorded and 32,000 on-the-job safety checks conducted.
At the end of October 2021, after 224,000 hours of work, the unit was successfully returned to service. Our teams are now well advanced in their planning for the next major Eraring unit outage scheduled to commence in August 2022.
