AEMO releases its ‘2019-20 NEM Summer Operations Review Report’

Given the current stresses relating to COVID-19 and its broader impact on our society, the economy (and the thankfully relatively small impact on aggregate electricity consumption in the National Electricity Market), it might be too easy to let the occasion of summer 2019-20 in the NEM pass without giving it the attention it deserves – given the many different layers of lessons we can learn about the challenges confronting us in this energy transition ahead.

Thankfully, the AEMO has released its Summer Operations Review Report today to help remind us of that necessity:

Because it is sometimes difficult to find documents on the AEMO website (especially later, after some time has elapsed) I’ve linked in here the following:

1)  Their News Release this morning on Monday 22nd June.

2)  The page on the AEMO website that links to the reports for this summer, but also preceding ones as well.

3)  The 66-page report  “2019-20 NEM Summer Operations Review Report – June 2020”.

.

(A)  Media coverage

Today I have seen in the main media feeds that I look at, the following:

1)  In the Australian, Nick Evans noted that ‘Bushfires prompted AEMO to step in 178 times’ as one metric that highlights how stressful the period was.

2)  In the Age, Peter Hannam wrote that ‘Australia’s summer of extremes pushed grid to the limit, AEMO says’

3)  In the AFR I can’t see anything yet today

4)  On RenewEconomy, Giles Parkinson wrote that ‘Smoke and high-temperature cut-outs hit solar and wind output in summer from hell’

5)  Checking this morning I could not immediately see anything on the ABC.  Perhaps I missed something?

If readers can find other references, please free to add them as comments below?

(B)  On WattClarity®

As you’d recall, we posted many articles, as summer 2019-20 rolled through.

In particular:

1) remember the article posted on 11th February titled ‘Extreme temperature effects on generation supply technology’, which was very topical over that summer.  There’s an event being organised soon, where these types of challenges might be discussed further.

2) it’s such a significant issue that we invested time in preparing analysis for every single DUID of each assets performance in relation to local temperatures (published in the ‘B’ Pages of the Generator Statistical Digest 2019).

Give us some time to digest this AEMO report and we’ll work out what’s next on WattClarity.  However keep in mind that our main focus is on serving our clients through our software tools – and reports like the Generator Report Card (with perhaps another issue of this early 2021 with data to December 2020).