Extreme weather conditions are forecast today for Victoria – as a result of which we see exceptional messages such as this one relating to bushfire risk (and related risk of isolation etc) in the East Gippsland area:
Focusing more narrowly on just the National Electricity Market and using this 14-day trend from ez2view online (now updated*) we see the current forecast for Demand and Non-Scheduled Generation** is that it won’t be quite as high as what was experienced on Friday 20th December.
Notes:
* the trend has been updated to extend “Available Generation” across all plant (not just Scheduled) in order to be more comparable with the Demand and Non-Scheduled Generation figure. Thanks for the pick-up, Allan!
** the AEMO increasingly speaks about “Operational Demand” as distinct from “Scheduled Demand” in terms of historical levels of demand. From a forecast perspective, the predispatch and ST PASA figures for “Demand and Non-Scheduled Generation” are closer to this Operational Demand than is “Total Demand”. Refer here for more of the gory details of the different definitions of demand.
Whilst it should not be a major problem for the Victorian region this week, it’s worth also quickly highlighting that the Return-to-Service of Loy Yang A2 hit a snag late on Friday 27th December (after coming back online 24th December), coming offline then for a “plant failure” noted in the rebid reason. The plant is still offline this morning (09:20) as I post this article:
Note that we won’t be providing a blow-by-blow commentary on all the machinations about the return-to-service, but thought this was worth noting in the context of today…
Also worth mentioning that Loy Yang B unit 1 went offline yesterday with a boiler tube leak. It will also be interesting to see if there’s any repeat of the heat derating of the windfarms that we saw on 20 December. A couple (Mt Gellibrand and Yaloak South) are offline as I type – possibly not heat-related – while output at Waubra and Macarthur is declining.