Earlier today I wrote several articles about ‘The ‘Faster than Forecast’ session in the afternoon of day 1 CEC’s QCES 2025’.
… and I have also noted that the Operating in the NEM session yesterday was of interest (more on that later).
I did not make it to much of the second day, but wanted to wrap up with a couple short pieces following the afternoon’s ‘Long Duration Energy Storage’ (LDES) session:
Briefly…
1) Quick with a quip, Sarah Fitzgerald from GHD chaired the session by noting something along the lines of ‘if short-duration batteries are the espresso fix for the afternoon session, then long-duration storage is the intravenous drip that keeps us going when all else fails’.
2) Craig Francis from Genex Power:
(a) Powered through many photos and pictures to inform us of all that’s been done to get Kidston Pumped Hydro ready for operations (energisation expected later this year);
… Coincidentally, readers can see where Kidston features in each of these 6 lenses of the supply mix for firming capacity published earlier today.
(b) But also (importantly, in my view) wondered why it’s been the case that the LDES component of the energy transition has been (seemingly) seen as the ‘unsexy’ part … as a result of which these sessions tend to be squeezed into the afternoon of the second day.
(a) Shared these two charts to highlight the vastly different operational profiles for Swanbank E and Wivenhoe compared to ~10 years earlier; and
(b) Rimu also shared these ‘CleanCo modelled results of one scenario in a year late in the next decade’.
4) Oliver Nunn from Endgame Analytics
(a) returning to give us a second serving after his contributions the day before) …
(b) provided more food for thought – our recollections which we’ve summarised in ‘Oliver Nunn (from Endgame Analytics) illustrates how wind droughts are ‘a thing’’.
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