Case Study of NEM-wide Aggregate Scheduled Target on Thursday 18th January 2024

As noted earlier today, we’re a little behind schedule in completion of GenInsights Quarterly Updates for 2024 Q1 – for several reasons (including that this quarter experienced a significant number of interesting events that we are delving into.

In this second article today about NEM-wide Aggregate Scheduled Target (i.e. which we review each quarter as a measure of the changing requirement for firming capacity) we utilise NEMreview v7 to post this quick summary of AggSchedTarget across all 288 dispatch intervals on Thursday 18th January 2024:

2024-01-18-NEMreview-AggSchedTarget

Those with a licence to the software can open their own copy of this query here.

Without delving more deeply…

1)  We can see (from 15:15 to 15:20, NEM time) on the day, a significant ramp up on AggSchedTarget;

(a)  This was 2,068MW in a five-minute period;

(b)  We see that, coincident with this ramp up, the spot price drop in SA, VIC and NSW:

i.  All to below ‘negative LGC’ levels

ii.  But particularly in NSW … down to –$814.82/MWh.

(c)  Without looking further, we hypothesise that:

i.    this price drop led to significant Economic Curtailment of Semi-Scheduled VRE … leaving Scheduled Capacity to ramp quickly to fill the gap.

ii.   we wonder what triggered that price drop, particularly in NSW:

…  To what extent was rebidding involved?

…   Or was it network congestion?

(d)  We also wonder what (Semi-Scheduled) units ramped down, and what (Scheduled) units ramped up?

2)  We also see other dispatch intervals in which AggSchedTarget bounced around in parallel with price variability.

 

… all things that might be explored later…


About the Author

Paul McArdle
One of three founders of Global-Roam back in 2000, Paul has been CEO of the company since that time. As an author on WattClarity, Paul's focus has been to help make the electricity market more understandable.

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