What was the peak NEM-Wide Demand this Winter?

There’s two answers to that question (well, at least two) – it depends on whether you were thinking about winter in the traditional sense, or “winter” in relation to our Best Demand Forecaster for Winter 2009 Competition!

The following chart (from NEM-Review) provides an explanation of the difference, and the two answers:

Chart from NEM-Review highlighting daily maximum NEM-Wide demand for each day over winter

As noted in the diagram, we defined “winter” as the period from the day entries closed (29th June) through until the end of August.  Hence, you can see how:

1)  The highest NEM-Wide demand was actually recorded on Thursday 11th June 2009 (which was before entries closed)
what happened on the 11th June is further discussed here.

2)  In the period we defined as “winter” (for the competition) we can see that the highest NEM-Wide demand occurred on Tuesday 7th July 2009.

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What was it, on a dispatch (5-minute) basis?

Also noted in the diagram, NEM-Review provides updates of only the 30-minute “trading” data, as published by NEMMCO/AEMO.  Whereas in our competition, we asked for the highest NEM-Wide dispatch target demand (which is what is shown in NEM-Watch in real-time).

With reference to our infoserver replica, we found that the peak NEM-Wide Demand Target (on a NEM-Wide basis) for “winter” occurred at 18:25 on the 7th July 2009, and was at the level of 31,873 MW.

Note that this number is higher than that shown in the chart above, as the data from NEM-Review is the trading (i.e. 30-minute) data, which is the simple average of 6 x 5-minute dispatch demand figures that occurred in that half-hour.

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So who won the competition?

Now that we have established what the peak demand was for “winter” 2009, we can now investigate who won the competition….


About the Author

Paul McArdle
Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients. Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.

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