Some brief data gathering and analysis, primarily because I could not resist the exploration, of what might have happened with the load shedding in the electricity grid across England, Wales and Scotland on Friday last week.
Last week’s notable under-frequency load shedding in Great Britain following what appears to be the loss of two generation units in quick succession prompts me to publish some of the analysis of aggregate levels of inertia supplied by synchronous generators in South Australia as part of the Generator Report Card.
A full page article in the FinReview today quotes a number of people (including our work in the Generator Report Card) speaking about heightened risk in the NEM. Coincident with this, we see another instance of negative prices in South Australia (which has become increasingly common) but also something I can’t remember seeing before – an average negative price across the entire day so far!
Given the high level of interest in the Generator Report Card, both the Australian Institute of Energy and the Australian Energy Council have organised separate events (in Sydney in August) providing the opportunity to talk through some of the things we’ve learnt through the process of putting the Generator Report Card together. You’re most welcome to attend!
In terms of diversity of intermittent supplies, we need to understand that we’re not just comparing data series on a scale that runs from “highly correlated” to “random”…
A synopsis of the presentation provided by guest author, Jonathon Dyson, at the Solar Asset Management conference earlier today in Sydney.
Returning to the challenge posed to readers in April 2019, to guess (or analytically determine!) which of the hundreds of units operating in the NEM showed such a severe limitation in output at high temperatures. It’s not what most people thought it was – far from it!
Some excerpts from the Generator Report Card to sample some of the analysis we performed to assess various aspects of the ‘dependability’ of coal-fired power stations in the NEM. In this post we highlight availability (or, more precisely, the level of unavailability) as an aggregated monthly volumetric measure trended over 17 years.
Here’s some initial details of upcoming informal Q&A sessions in Melbourne (on Tuesday next week!), followed by Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney – where we’d look forward to meeting with those interested in the Generator Report Card.
The framework we used to analyse the extent to which coal-fired power is “dependable” in the Generator Report Card, and the extent to which it’s been changing.
A summary of some comments that we’ve seen in the first few days of the Generator Report Card
For those who have already pre-ordered their copy, this is how you can access – and for those who have not, but would like a copy, this is how to arrange this as well.
Worth sharing the level of detail we’re going to, in Part 3 of the Generator Report Card (5 parts in total), where we have assembled millions of data points into a single page summarizing the last 10 years of performance of a particular generation unit. There’s a page for each operational unit (327 in total).
We’re taking a much, much deeper dive into generator performance at high temperatures (for all DUIDs operational across the NEM) to see how each one of them, individually, is affected by high temperatures. Guess which one this “mystery DUID” is and we’d look forward to providing some form of prize…
Sharing a trend of daily capacity factor across all Large Solar plant (post commissioning) in the NEM (preliminary analysis for our Generator Report Card).
Guest author, Allan O’Neil, contributes to our series of articles explaining how prices are set the the NEM (as part of how dispatch works). In this article, Allan explains some of the details in the AEMO’s “Price Setter” file.
Last week the AEMO released a draft of the Marginal Loss Factors (MLFs) that would apply to both generation and loads connected to the NEM. This page on the AEMO site links to more details. On that page, the AEMO…
A quick article highlighting how the trend in aggregate number of unit starts, across the whole of the NEM, highlights the scale of one of the core underlying changes (and challenges) facing us in the NEM’s energy transition.
A collection of thoughts that have been bumping around in my head for some time about the latest push by various parties to facilitate a broader range of demand response in the NEM, and whether there are better options
In the process of assembling a long-range data set on how much every single generator has contributed to the price of Energy in each Region of the NEM (which we’re doing for our Generator Report Card 2018) we’ve pulled some preliminary analysis together here of how many dispatch intervals since 1st January 2018 see the Price Setter files highlight instances of setting the price ranging:
from “Very Simple” (at Category 1)
… to “Very Complex” (at Category 5)