Whilst working on another task yesterday afternoon I came to ponder whether the WDRM (i.e. Wholesale Demand Response Mechanism) had actually been used since the rule change came into effect on 24th October 2021, roughly two months ago.
The rule change allows large industrial energy users (or aggregations of energy users) to bid a reduction of their demand into the NEM in the form of ‘Negawatts’.
Shortly after the WDRM was implemented in late October:
1) Some on our team were quick to update our ez2view software (releasing v9.3 as a result) to include visibility of these Negawatts in some widgets where we display generation totals for each region … such as the ‘NEM Map’ widget.
2) On Wednesday 27th October, Paul had a quick look to see if any Negawatts were dispatched during price volatility – but alas it was too early to see any.
It occurred to me today that since the rule change was implemented, I could not recall any time where I saw the total aggregate of WDR not be 0MW. Paul was equally curious and suggested that I do some digging to see if any Negawatts had been dispatched through the WDRM.
Number of WDR Units Currently Registered?
As of today the 22nd of December 2021, there are currently three units in the NEM registered to provide Negawatts under the WDRM – two of which are in the VIC region while the other is in NSW. All three are managed by Enel X and the total capacity* of these three units is 20MW.
* In demand response terms, ‘capacity’ is defined as the ‘Maximum Response Component’. Further explanation of how this works is included in the AEMO’s WDR high-level design document.
Number of MW Dispatched
From a very quick investigation, I can see that only two of those WDR units have been dispatched into the market, on one sole occasion. The two units, one from NSW and the other from VIC, were both dispatched for a short period from around midday on 12th November, 2021 (as seen in this cut-out from the ‘NEM Map’ widget in ez2view, Time-Travelled back to that time).
The first MWs of WDR are dispatched at 2021-11-12 during the 12:05 DI as displayed from our NEM Map widget within ez2view.
The ‘WDR’ icon in the bottom right of the image shows the region’s total for WDR units.
It is still very early days for the WDRM and we must remember that the application process for new units necessitates several stages, so we’d expect that number to rise over the coming months and years.
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