Another quick note to follow my second (just an hour ago) and my first (from early this morning) to flag a couple prominent developments. Again I have numbered them on the attached snapshot from NEM-Watch at 13:20 this afternoon:
1) Currently the demand (on a Dispatch Target basis) is up at 9,155MW (so easily in excess of prior years, from memory).
2) AEMO’s updated demand forecast has been revised (back) up, for the half-hour ending 17:00 to be 9,538MW – which would definitely be a new record.
3) I’ve also flagged the lower level of Instantaneous Reserve Plant Margin shown for the Queensland Economic Island – now marginally above 10%, with less than 1000MW spare
4) Highlighted in the list of Market Notices is the short-notice transmission outage in Powerlink’s network on a high-voltage piece of the network connecting Tarong to Mt England (i.e. on the way in to Brisbane).
This is one of the transmission lines supplying from the South-West into Brisbane. Thankfully there are multiple lines – but an outage on one (which must clearly be needed on a day like today) does reduce the level of redundancy.
Here’s the full text:
At a very high level, the constraint set invoked will preference generation in the southern part of Queensland over the northern part (e.g. Stanwell, Gladstone and Callide) by virtue of new limitations.
5) As can be seen, solar production has already reached what will probably be peak output this afternoon (at 1,000MW – but 100MW or so lower than yesterday’s peak, presumably because of cloud cover) and will begin the afternoon decline shortly (initially gradual, but then more rapidly to be pretty much all gone by 18:00).
Buckle up for the afternoon ride!
PS by the time this went live (13:40) the demand was up to 9,201MW and he IRPM down to only 8%
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