A brief review of the (only!) 88MW of wind output NEM-wide at 13:20 on Thursday 13th June 2024

We’ve already posted today about ‘Correlation between low wind Capacity Factor and low IRPM (NEM-wide) in recent evenings …’

In that article we utilised a 30-day long Trends query from ez2view to highlight the high points, and the low points, of aggregate Wind Output through from late May to now.  In terms of low points, one particular one stood out to me – which is this one here:

This time-travelled snapshot in ez2view focuses on the 13:20 dispatch interval on Thursday 13th June 2024 (i.e. almost exactly a week ago) when we saw:

1)  Aggregate output from Wind Farms across the NEM being a miserly 88MW;

2)  Which works out to be an instantaneous capacity factor of 0.77%

A few additional notes:

1)  From a VRE perspective, remember that this is early afternoon so we would hope (I have not checked) that solar yield was cranking at that time;

2)  In the ‘NEM Map’ on the left, we can see that:

(a)  most of that 88MW was coming from Wind Farms in South Australia (i.e. 65MW, still a very low level for all the capacity there)

(b)  whereas TAS, VIC, NSW and QLD were all very becalmed.

3)  Now that we have a zoomed in view:

(a)  we can see that there was no curtailment of wind (for economic curtailment or network curtailment reasons)

(b)  meaning that it’s just because the wind was very, very becalmed.

4)  For the pedantic reader who tries to add the numbers up from the ‘NEM Map’ on the left, remember the ‘law of small numbers’ means that rounding of decimals means you will get slightly different to 88MW.

Wow!