It’s worth a quick post to note that yesterday (Christmas Day) saw the moderate temperatures in Victoria and the Pac-Man effect of small-scale PV output (up to 700MW yesterday) saw the “Scheduled Demand” for the Victorian region drop as low during afternoon as it did at 04:00 on 25th December and 26th December. Here’s a snapshot from NEM-Watch v10 this morning:
Lest some readers overlook other factors weighing into the low demand across the day, I’ve included this shorter-term trend from NEMreview v7 to highlight the quite low apparent temperatures Victoria saw on Christmas Day – meaning low air-conditioning load, which would have combined with the lower commercial load and the small-scale solar during the afternoon to deliver lower demand levels:
In years gone by, it used to be fairly typical that “the night before Christmas” , or the night after, would see lowest point of demand for the year – however in this second trend from NEMreview v7 to below we see that the past coupe of years have seen demand levels lower at other points of time:
So apparent demand was only less than 45% what it was on the afternoon of 19 Dec! 8500 vs 3500 or so. Such variability.