Forecast tight supply-demand balance (i.e. LOR2) for QLD and NSW on Thursday evening 7th November 2024

Worth a short note, given the alerts from ez2view have continued to buzz in recent days, as the AEMO continues to update forecast LOR2 warnings for both QLD and NSW regions for Thursday 7th November 2024.

Readers should remember that the purpose of these forecasts of LOR2 is to elicit a market response.

1)  So the tight supply-demand balance may not eventuate;

2)  Though readers might read into this a heightened chance of some price action on Thursday afternoon and evening.

Contributing Factor #1)  Planned outages at some coal units

Here’s a snapshot of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget in ez2view as at Saturday 2nd November 2024 looking forward to Thursday 7th November 2024, highlighting a number of planned outages of coal units:

1)  There are planned outages at 9 (of 44 currently operational) coal units;

2)  Which is normal … remembering that these shoulder seasons have traditionally been ‘outage seasons’, though these sorts of rules of thumb are increasingly challenged as the energy transition rolls on.

Across all three of the largest regions there are coal units with

1)  In NSW we have planned outages at Bayswater 2, Eraring 3, and Vales Point 6

2)  In QLD we have planned outages at Callide B2, Gladstone 2, Kogan Creek (which came off this morning, as planned), and Tarong unit 2

… noting Tarong unit 1 is planned to be back in service (just!) on Thursday 7th November 2024 (so there might be some stakeholders sweating on that)

3)  In VIC we have planned outages at Loy Yang A2 and Yallourn unit 1.

Contributing Factor #2)  Forecast poor (Solar and) Wind Yield on Thursday afternoon/evening

Here’s a collage of a couple ‘Forecast Convergence’ widgets in ez2view looking at forecast UIGF for Wind across the NEM, and UIGF for Large Solar across the NEM:

Remember that this widget allows the user to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.

As highlighted on the image:

1)  At the top, we see poor and getting poorer forecast UIGF for Wind Capability right across the NEM for Thursday 7th November afternoon and evening.

2)  Whilst it’s obvious that there’ll be no solar yield after sunset, we can see (at the bottom) that the forecast UIGF for Solar Capability is lower than neighbouring days right across the NEM for Thursday 7th November afternoon, and into evening sunset.

Does not make a great combination with many coal units on planned outage.

Contributing Factor #3)  Demand

Flipping the context to the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widgets in ez2view to look at NEM-wide ‘Market Demand’ (at the top) and Surplus (at the bottom)  we see that Thursday 7th November afternoon and evening clearly stands out:

As highlighted on the image:

1)  At the top, we see much higher ‘Market Demand’ for Thursday 7th November afternoon and evening than other days in this 14-day period (excepting Wednesday 8th November).

2)  At the bottom we also see the NEM-wide aggregate Surplus is down around 0MW for Thursday 7th November afternoon and evening.

… though caveats about the idiosyncrasies of the ST PASA process for determining Surplus!

More food for thought…

Contributing Factor #4)  Network outages

Also affected by ‘outage season’ is the transmission network – as we see in this ‘Constraint Sets’ widget Gantt-chart display that is filtered down:

1)  For Constraint Sets containing Constraint Equations with VIC1-NSW1 on the LHS …

2)  and also excluding many System Normal constraint sets.

Other contributing factors

… and that’s not all …