High electricity demand forecast for Queensland – on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week

Our display copy of NEM-Watch v10 alerted us to the expectation of high temperatures coming for NSW and Queensland in the coming days – as shown in the snapshot here from 17:50 NEM time:

2018-02-09-at-17-50-NEMwatch-hotweatherforecastNSWandQLD

The full text of the Market Notice is shown here:

2018-02-09-at-11-32-NEMwatch-MarketNotice

The high temperatures are forecast to begin tomorrow, but the coincident high temperature forecasts noted for in Sydney and Queensland (albeit Rockhampton – less a driver of demand, though still impacting on generation capability) makes Wednesday seem to be the most critical day from a supply/demand perspective.

In the interests of time (and with apologies to our NSW-based friends) I’ll ignore NSW in our article here and just pull up the following web-based time-series trend widget from ez2view to visualise what the AEMO is forecasting for Queensland in the week ahead:

2018-02-09-at-17-45-ez2view-forecasthighQLDdemand-Mon-Tue-Wed

As noted on the chart, all three days (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday) are forecast to have high demand, peaking at around 17:00 – so before the sun has set, but still with solar contribution waning in the afternoon (today it was down to 400MW or so from small-scale and large-scale in the state at that time).

On all three days the demand is forecast to be above 9,000MW – with Wednesday forecast to be the highest of the three (though still slightly below the all-time record set last summer).

Will make for an interesting day on Wednesday 14th February, if high temperature in NSW also drives demand there high and imposes limits on generation capability across several technologies!


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.

1 Comment on "High electricity demand forecast for Queensland – on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week"

  1. Paul,

    Just curious … Is this forecast is using the 50POE curve from AEMO? Just looking at the numerical weather forecasts for reference weather stations, I think we might be heading for a 10POE day on Wednesday. If – and that is a big if – the weather forecasts holds and the forecast thunderstorms stay away, we might start nudging the 10,000 figure. (AMEO operational demand forecast for Wednesday is 9954 @ 17:00hrs on 14/02).

    Thoughts???

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