A hot, but windy, day in the south presents less challenge to the supply/demand balance

With the forecasts received last week of higher demand again in Victoria and South Australia we watched with interest what unfolded today (a day when schools and businesses are generally back in full swing).

After a few Market Notices issued in the preceding week, with reference to today, we saw this LOR1 market notice pop up early this afternoon, generated by an Local Alarm triggered from our central display copy of NEM-Watch (note LOR1 is less severe than the LOR3 warning seen 2 weeks ago):

AEMO Market Notice warning of low reserve condition in South Australia

As such, we were even more interested to see what progressed during that period today – for instance, with respect to this market snapshot at 16:30 today from NEM-Watch:

2014-01-28-at-16-30-NEM-Watch-highdemandinVIC

We see the Victorian Scheduled Dispatch Demand Target being above 10,000MW and well into the red zone (not far off the level experienced a couple weeks ago) whilst the demand in South Australia in the yellow zone and still about 700MW off its all-time record.  We see the NEM-wide scheduled demand shy of 31,000MW (this level – 30,731MW – was the highest it reached today).

Interestingly, we see that Tasmania sat at negative prices for a number of hours through the day – again illustrating some of the complexities inherent in the NEM.

Looking in more detail at the South Australian region with ez2view in the 16:35 dispatch interval five minutes later, we see the wind farms have been operating with significant output today for much of the day:

A windy day provides significant output from SA wind farms

The same was the case in Victoria with a similar snapshot from ez2view:

Much of VIC generation (coal, gas and wind) is running to meet the high demand


About the Author

Paul McArdle
One of three founders of Global-Roam back in 2000, Paul has been CEO of the company since that time. As an author on WattClarity, Paul's focus has been to help make the electricity market more understandable.

1 Comment on "A hot, but windy, day in the south presents less challenge to the supply/demand balance"

  1. I was curious to see if it would become so hot that many wind farms would lose generating capacity due to high temperature shutdowns (which often occur around 40 degrees celsius for many models of turbine).

    Though it’s hard to discern from generation data exactly what caused a shutdown, this didn’t seem to impact the fleet as a whole, which is good to see.

    Cheers for the post, Paul.

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