Metered Generation data feed for Royalla Solar commences (6 months after plant opening)

On RenewEconomy here, a snapshot from NEM-Watch aggregating large-scale solar for NSW was used to illustrate the increased output (I’d supplied this image to Giles following earlier reports of the increase in capacity at the plant).

It was the weekend so I did not check the details, and it was not until today that I noticed another development coincident in the solar space – the AEMO is now publishing metered generation output for the Royalla solar project (6 months after it opened) along with Nyngan.  This makes a grand total of 2 large-scale solar plants whose outputs are published by the AEMO, so far.

Here’s how a longer-term trend looks in our NEM-Review software (which enables the user to dissect generation by fuel type into its individual elements):

Note the most recent 3 days in the trend, showing how Royalla is the “little brother” to the larger Nyngan project, even with Nyngan not yet at its full load.  Peak output over these three days, according to this metered generation data, was just 15.5MW – well below the 30MW threshold at which AEMO requires registration, so presumably included into the AEMO data set (and passed through to NEM-Review automatically) because of the groundswell of interest in solar (large and small).

Also noted on the image, I’ve illustrated two different price “blips” (to call them “spikes” hardly does justice to the most volatile commodity market in the world):

1)  On Monday 23rd March we have morning and evening price blips that almost exactly straddle the output pattern of Nyngan; and

2)  On Thursday 16th April we have a price blip that appears to coincide better with peak output times for the solar station.  Zooming in (shown below) we see some how the price blip coincided with a drop in output at Nyngan (presumably because of some cloud cover).  We have not investigated further to see about other contributing factors (but are sure there will have been some):

As with all generation types, we’ll continue watching (through our NEM-Watch and NEM-Review software) with great interest – and publishing (on WattClarity), as time permits.

Note that this Royalla data feed was automatically picked up and included in the “NSW Large Scale Solar” metric published in NEM-Watch (sample shown below) and on this NEM-Watch widget on RenewEconomy:

With reference to Giles’ article here, the appearance of Royalla is the reason why it appeared (as it did not occur to me that Royalla had appeared in the data)  that “managed to produce above its nominal capacity – to 65MW on Sunday morning.”