Forecast LOR2 for the QLD region on Tuesday 8th October 2024

Worth a short article today (Sunday 6th October 2024) because of the Market Notice 118628 as follows:

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MARKET NOTICE
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From :              AEMO
To   :              NEMITWEB1
Creation Date :     06/10/2024     10:47:49

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Notice ID               :         118628
Notice Type ID          :         RESERVE NOTICE
Notice Type Description :         LRC/LOR1/LOR2/LOR3
Issue Date              :         06/10/2024
External Reference      :         STPASA – Forecast Lack Of Reserve Level 2 (LOR2) in the QLD Region on 08/10/2024

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Reason :

AEMO ELECTRICITY MARKET NOTICE

AEMO declares a Forecast LOR2 condition under clause 4.8.4(b) of the National Electricity Rules for the QLD region for the following period[s]:

[1.] From 1730 hrs 08/10/2024 to 2000 hrs 08/10/2024.
The forecast capacity reserve requirement is 846 MW.
The minimum capacity reserve available is 438 MW.

AEMO is seeking a market response.

AEMO has not yet estimated the latest time it would need to intervene through an AEMO intervention event.

Manager NEM Real Time Operations

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END OF REPORT
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Given that this is looking forward to the evening of Tuesday 8th October 2024, first port of call was the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view focused on the QLD region across four different metrics out in the ST PASA time horizon:

For those new to this site and this widget, it’s designed that the user can ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.

Starting bottom left and rotating clockwise, we see:

1)  Whilst forecast ‘Market Demand’ for Tuesday is still quite modest (i.e. ~8,000MW is approx 3,000MW below the all-time maximum), it’s also higher than forecast for other evenings this week

2)  We see that Available Generation drops each evening (with the sunsetting of Large Solar capability), and that (in the top rows) there’s been some other drop in capability forecast in the most recent ST PASA runs.

3)  These two factors combined to an increasingly negative ‘Surplus’ Generation (or, increased reliance on imports from NSW).

4)  All this combines to a recently upgraded forecast Lack of Reserve for QLD on Tuesday evening …now at forecast LOR2 level.

My next view is the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view that provides a view of the MT PASA DUID Availability data set:

1)  Which is published for Scheduled units thanks to the ERM Rule Change

… alas not for Semi-Scheduled units, which are invisible in this respect

2)  We’ve filtered down in this view to just the coal units across the NEM.

Hence we see this:

Note that:

1)  Remembering that it’s spring (i.e. shoulder season, or ‘outage season’) it’s no surprise to see a number of coal units on planned outage …

(a)  particularly Callide B1 and B2,

(b)  and also Gladstone unit 6,

(c)  and Tarong Unit 2,

(d)  plus others in NSW and VIC.

2)  But we also see:

(a) that Millmerran unit 1 is offline today unexpectedly, when we’d normally expect it to be running.

(b)  Gladstone unit 1 also has another unit off but (based on the turquoise colour in previous days, we guess that it’s available today if AEMO wants to direct … like it was in other recent days).

The MT PASA DUID Availability data set has not been updated (by design) since 18:00 on Saturday 5th October, so we need to ST PASA to see more recent changes.

There’s a ‘PASA’ widget in ez2view for this, providing access to three different ST PASA runs – in this snapshot I’ve chosen the ‘Reliability LRC’ run:

When comparing the ‘Unconstrained Capacity’ data set for QLD from the 11:00 ST PASA run this morning with the one for 18:00 yesterday evening, we see that there is indeed a drop in aggregate ‘Unconstrained Capacity’ forecast for Tuesday evening 8th October 2024 (i.e. as part of a broader drop the next few days).

No doubt some readers will try to guess at which unit(s) in QLD have changed their availability plans, but I won’t go there…