Friday 12th January saw high instantaneous wind output in South Australia (but not quite a new record)

Sheltering from the heat and humidity in Queensland today I noticed this nice use of our upgraded RenewEconomy-sponsored NEMwatch “Supply and Demand Widget” yesterday (Friday 12th January 2018 – a windy day in South Australia):

2018-01-12-NEMwatchRenewEconomy-tweet

The author of the tweet noted that the aggregate output from wind farms in South Australia was running up at 1,598MW at 07:40 NEM time on the day (so 08:20 Adelaide Daylight Savings Time).

They noted that it was the most they’d ever seen – which made me wonder what the actual peak for output is these days (given the development of new wind farms it is expected that output will continue growing, hence new records being set).  So having NEMreview v7 open already, I quickly put this chart together to show a couple of things:

1)  The peak output on Friday was very close to the all-time record, but not quite (with that occurring on Tuesday 19th December 2017 with a peak of 1,618MW).

2)  We see the highest average output still occurred over a number of days of winter 2017 (with the remarkable exception of June 2017 where the wind consistently went missing for these reasons).

3)  I’ve also flagged Monday 28th August 2017 as a day of consistently high prices (averaging above $300/MWh over the day) partially as a result of the absence of wind on that day, with the maximum output on that day being only around 240MW.

2018-01-13-NEMreview7-reviewingWindinSA

Plenty more to analyse at another time (or NEMreview clients are welcome to start with the template here of the chart above and continue on their own) …


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.

Be the first to comment on "Friday 12th January saw high instantaneous wind output in South Australia (but not quite a new record)"

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


*