Hot weather in Queensland to drive Electricity Demand high this week (and warning of LOR2 Low Reserve Condition)

It’s heating up in Brisbane again today, with the temperature already showing above 30 degrees where we live.  The next three days are forecast to be up at 33 degrees.

Given our ongoing interest in understanding the details of electricity demand (notwithstanding all these complexities about how to measure it, and what “it” actually means), I took a quick look at the current state of Scheduled Demand via NEM-Watch v10 and see Scheduled Demand in Queensland currently quite low – which is not surprising as:
1)  It’s a Sunday; and
2)  The injections of rooftop PV are cranked up today – which are acting to reduce Scheduled Demand:

In the snapshot, I have also highlighted a Market Notice referencing a forecast LOR2 Low Reserve Condition on Tuesday evening 16:00-18:00 NEM time (which also happens to be Brisbane time), which is at the tail end of the day as the solar injections are declining markedly.  Here’s the text of the market notice:

Opening up a pre-prepared trended view of supply and demand over a 14 day period for Queensland via ez2view online, we see that (currently) the Queensland Operational Demand is forecast to be as high as 8,800MW on Tuesday evening – which would be the highest we’ve seen it reach since last summer:

Licensed users of ez2view can access a live updating view of this trend here.  Note that, even at this level, it would still be more than 1,000MW below the all-time maximum.

Finally, pulling in some snapshots from the “Forecast Convergence” widget in my installed copy of ez2view, I see that the AEMO’s forecast of Scheduled Demand for Tuesday evening has been progressively climbing to the current point in time (i.e. to the forecast last published Sunday 10:00):

In this widget we use colour thermalling to highlight (with red) the areas of most interest/concern – in this case the evening peaks in demand on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday:

Flipping the layer in Forecast Convergence we can also look at forecast Surplus Generation for the Queensland region (from successive ST PASA forecasts):

In this case, the colours are inverted – with red still highlighting the areas of most interest/concern, which are in this case the lowest numbers.

As per the annotation, we see that the forecast surplus generation in QLD for Tuesday evening is now looking not as critical as it was in the forecast from 16:00 yesterday (Saturday):
1)  We note that the forecast demand has continued to climb; but
2)  This means that there must have been additional dispatchable generation capacity made available for the (escalating) demand peak on Tuesday.
3)  Flipping Forecast Convergence to Available Generation confirms this (again, red is “bad”):

This is the sort of response that the AEMO Market Notices warning of LOR conditions are supposed to elicit.

We will watch with interest to see if more is forthcoming, as the LOR2 forecast is still current.