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):

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.

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) …