It’s Friday morning 20th March and I don’t have much time today.
Two of the jobs today being:
1) making an early release of the new NEM-Watch v10 available here, and
2) updating the NEM-Watch widget we’ve developed for RenewEconomy.
However I would like to include two snapshots of another high demand day in Queensland yesterday (Thursday 19th March) that again reinforces, to me, that it’s really becoming two distinctly different zones in the NEM – a higher demand Queensland region and the “southern regions” zone where (at least to my memory) demand has barely whimpered through the whole of summer.
In the next couple of weeks – because of the impending close of our competition(s) for this summer – I’ll invest some time in crunching the numbers, but I can’t recall seeing any high demand days in any of the other regions.
These snapshots (from the new NEM-Watch v10.0.4 application) are particularly timely given Gerard’s comments yesterday about how the ongoing solar boom is hollowing out demand in the middle of the day (the “Duck Curve”), but leaving later evening peaks – at least in some locations – largely untouched.
As noted before, it seems that (at a regional level) the timing of the peak in scheduled demand is shifting later in the day than what
It was before I left the office that I tweeted this this image noting that demand was high and likely to go higher, in marked contrast with what we saw in Victoria at the same time:
It wasn’t till later that evening at home that I grabbed this image highlighting how the demand had peaked up at 8,408MW – and late in the day as well (18:50 NEM time):
Yesterday’s late peak in Queensland demand provided one more reminder of a number of different challenges that the NEM is facing with the interplay between emissions-reduction policy and the traditional focuses of security of supply and cost of supply.
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