By now our schools are full again, and businesses are back at work – so it is timely to review how demand in the NEM trended through the holiday months of December and January.
As shown in the following chart, demand across the NEM has not yet even risen above the level of 30,000MW this summer:
Despite the display anomalies in the Excel chart (because of the volume of data included) we can see how the daily maximum and minimum demands have trended across the two months of summer to date.
Comparing this to a similar chart for summer 2010-11, we see that the demand pattern was largely similar – in that (except for that hot week in February 2011) the demand rarely rose above 30,000MW. Prices have also been subdued – at least in part because of low demand.
We’ll do more detailed analysis at the end of summer, but an eyeball comparison seems to show a very similar pattern of demand (minimum, maximum and average) as we experienced last year. Another indication, perhaps, that these factors are at play.
One implication of this development is that Aden Fanning is the person who’s still front-runner for our BBQ prize with his lowest entry here – though I don’t think he’d be ordering the sausages yet…
Gee, who would have thought that we’d have such low demand this summer!?! I can see my bbq ambitions going down the drain. But maybe we’ll still get a bit of a summer for the remainder of Feb, and temperatures will hopefully go up a bit…