New low points for minimum demand on Sunday 17th October 2021 (part 1)

AEMO did forecast that a new ‘record minimum’ for Operational Demand would be low today – Sunday 17th October 2021.

It’s not yet midday (NEM time, at least) and the SMS alerts have been pinging off for the past hour or so, as shown in this snapshot here:

These alerts are referenced to a level (4,605MW for Scheduled Demand in NSW) which is below the prior record level set in NSW on Monday 4th October of 4,617MW.

(A)  New lowest point for NSW Minimum Demand

Here’s a snapshot of the first interval mentioned on the alerts from NEMwatch – at the 10:45 dispatch interval, with the NSW ‘Total Demand’  measure already dropped to 4599MW … and, as we can see, forecast to drop lower later today:

Plenty of blue on the NEMwatch map!

(B)  New lowest point for NEM-wide Minimum Demand

Also highlighted is how the NEM-wide aggregated ‘Total Demand’ measure is (at 13,256MW for the 10:45 dispatch interval today) already below the prior ‘lowest point’ set at 13,273MW on Sunday 3rd October 2021.

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We’ll probably be back later with a ‘Part 2’ article to discuss more what actually happened…