Queensland demand continues to climb – towards the all-time maximum

A hot day across much of the state today sees Queensland demand continuing to climb into the afternoon.

Here’s a snapshot from NEM-Watch taken at 15:15 market time, which shows demand at 8,603MW (just short of the all-time record of 8,943MW demand – on a Dispatch Target basis, explained here).

Keeping in mind that this high demand level is being experienced on a day when some businesses (and all the schools) are still out on holidays highlights the extreme nature of the air-conditioning load.

In contrast, the cooler colours of the other regions highlight the more moderate temperatures, and hence electricity demand levels.  As such, the NEM-Wide demand (of interest to our competition entrants, amongst others) is only 25,955MW.

In the second illustration (from ez2viewAustralia) we see that most of the major coal-fired plant around the state is running hard to meet the high demand levels being experienced today:

So far today, the demand has not reached the 9,000MW mark forecast by Joe Adamo at AEMO (reported in the Courier Mail this morning).

In the second image shown here, we see the demand in the south-east corner (i.e. Moreton 3,718 + Gold Coast 638) is 4,356MW as metered by Powerlink at 15:19.  This is an area roughly comparable to the Energex distribution area, where the record demand quoted in the same article as 4,670MW.

Hence it would appear that it’s high, but not (yet?) a record.