Curtailment at New England Solar Farm – Sat 22nd and Sun 23rd February 2025

Another conversation this week led to a discussion about New England Solar Farm unit 2, and some pretty strong curtailment through daylight hours over the prior weekend – Saturday 22nd February and Sunday 23rd February 2025.

This is seen through the ‘Unit Dashboard’ widget in ez2view here as at 08:25 (NEM time) on Tuesday 25th February 2025:

There’s a couple other notes on the image, but we’ll particularly highlight here the very strong curtailment through daylight hours:

1)  On Saturday 22nd February 2025:

(a)  Unit output was ramped fully down to 0MW at 09:25 (NEM time) … i.e. first time target = 0MW

(b)  And remained at 0MW until 13:10 (NEM time)  … i.e. first time target > 0MW since that time

2)  On Sunday 23rd February 2025:

(a)  Unit output was ramped fully down to 0MW at until 08:30 (NEM time) …i.e. first time target = 0MW

(b)  And remained at 0MW until 14:20 (NEM time) … i.e. first time target > 0MW since that time

By way of comparison, here’s the older sibling, NEWENSF1 – which was not curtailed nearly as severely over the weekend:

Time permitting, we might delve into those two days above for NEWENSF2 in a subsequent article.

What about unit output (and curtailment) through 2024?

Given the recent release of the GSD2024, I thought it might be relevant to show some snippets from the ‘A’ Page and ‘B’ Page together for both units:

New England Solar Farm 2

We can see in the following image that the capacity factor was quite low through October 2024:

… and there are a number of constraint equations listed that are

New England Solar Farm 1

Here’s the older sibling again, with a similar drop in output through October 2024:

… with similar constraint equations listed as ‘top 5’ for the entire calendar 2024 year (and with them prevalent in October 2024).