Hot weather moves north-eastwards, driving demand in NSW

Yesterday I wrote about how demand in VIC and SA was driven higher because of high temperatures across those regions.

Today, we saw the weather front continue to travel across to the north-east, driving demand in NSW higher.

I don’t have much time today to post any details, but would like to leave this snapshot from NEM-Watch with you, as it clearly shows how demand in NSW (shown as 13,342MW on a dispatch demand basis at 14:10 (NEM time)) was edging up towards the record (that of 14,411MW, as highlighted on the colour legend on the left).

As was the case yesterday, NEM-wide demand was in the area of 33,500MW (still well below the record set last summer).  Unfortunately we did not have time to run our “Best Demand Forecaster in the NEM” competition this summer.

Also, we can see that the NSW “Economic Island” has a low Instantaneous Reserve Plant Margin at the time captured here – with only 881MW of spare capacity, this represents a margin of 7%, and is one driver of the jump in prices seen in NSW.