Last minute complications mean that I cannot speak at today's "Queensland Smart Energy Summit" (with Jonathon Dyson being an even better substitute). Here are some of the observations I would have liked to discuss with the audience there...
Guest author Allan O'Neil provides this handy explainer on how generators’ contract positions affect their bidding decisions and can make negative spot prices pay off, at least in the short term. Very useful for those readers not actively involved in wholesale trading in helping to...
Rapidly growing solar PV output has been widely tagged as the cause of low and even negative prices in Queensland. But in any market it’s the behaviour of ALL participants that determines price outcomes. Guest author Allan O’Neil takes a closer look at recent NEM...
The run of prices at $0/MWh and below is continuing in Queensland region this week as we pass into spring (many dispatch intervals today down as low as the Market Price Floor at -$1,000/MWh). This begs a few questions...
Our various dashboard views of the NEM (NEMwatch, ez2view and deSide) have been showing what's seemed like increasing numbers of zero and negative prices in the NEM recently - particularly in QLD. Coupled with this we've seen various commentary on social media. Hence we took...
Without resiling from last week’s criticism of how the headlines from AEMO’s 2019 Electricity Statement of Opportunities (ESOO) were communicated, it’d be churlish for me to fault the depth of disclosure and data sitting behind those results. Literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of...
I’d rather not add to the number of conspiracy theories in circulation, but I wonder if there’s a conspiracy to make understanding our electricity system in general, and its reliability in particular, as difficult as humanly possible. There’s no doubt it’s a sophisticated piece of...
AEMO releases its Electricity Statement of Opportunities today, with an initial flurry of press coverage. Another reminder of heightened risk that the NEM is increasingly facing...
Two pages taken from our Generator Report Card following several different requests from people who attended different events recently where the Report Card was discussed.
A few additional thoughts about proposed changes to the MT PASA process, informed by our conclusions in Theme 14 within Part 2 of our Generator Report Card.
We've been invited by the Australian Institute of Energy (AIE) to speak this evening in Sydney about some of the lessons learnt in the process of completing our Generator Report Card. Here's some context for those who are going to attend (in terms of answers...
Some brief data gathering and analysis, primarily because I could not resist the exploration, of what might have happened with the load shedding in the electricity grid across England, Wales and Scotland on Friday last week.
Last week's notable under-frequency load shedding in Great Britain following what appears to be the loss of two generation units in quick succession prompts me to publish some of the analysis of aggregate levels of inertia supplied by synchronous generators in South Australia as part...
A full page article in the FinReview today quotes a number of people (including our work in the Generator Report Card) speaking about heightened risk in the NEM. Coincident with this, we see another instance of negative prices in South Australia (which has become increasingly...
Bit of an uncanny coincidence, having posted some concerns about the coming summer 2019-20 only 2 days ago, to find that the AEMO has called for expressions of interest for the Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader (RERT) Panel across all 5 regions! The AEMO has...
Given the high level of interest in the Generator Report Card, both the Australian Institute of Energy and the Australian Energy Council have organised separate events (in Sydney in August) providing the opportunity to talk through some of the things we've learnt through the process...
Coincidentally this week it seems to me that we're facing storm warnings on two different fronts - one literal (and much easier to prepare for), whilst the other one is metaphorical and operates at several different levels (and is much, much more difficult to manage).
Some thoughts about some important questions we should be asking, to follow on from AGL's announcement last Friday in relation to Torrens A (linked to Barkers Inlet and Loy Yang A2) and also about Liddell.
In terms of diversity of intermittent supplies, we need to understand that we're not just comparing data series on a scale that runs from "highly correlated" to "random"...
Some thoughts from Derek Chapman, from Adani Renewables, in conjunction with two rule change requests at the AEMC relating to Marginal Loss Factors.