Low point for demand in Victoria drops still lower on Sunday 1st November 2020

A short note this afternoon to note that it looks like the prior ‘all time* record minimum’ for Scheduled Demand set in Victoria on Sunday 6th September 2020 (down at 2,690MW at 13:55 on the day) has been dropped still further only 8 weeks later, with the a new low point first being reached in the

*  ‘all time’, at least from the start of the NEM.  Obviously we could go back to the time >100 years ago when electrification was just starting and demand would have been lower then.

This point was captured in the NEMwatch v10 (entry-level dashboard) product in the 13:20 dispatch interval this afternoon, with the MMS field ‘Total Demand’ (i.e. Scheduled Demand target for ‘bulk demand’ the VIC region, with charging at Gannawarra and Ballarat batteries accounted for separately in AEMO’s NEMDE algorithm):

Accessing this previously created trend query from the online NEMreview v7 application, we also see that the AEMO’s measure of ‘Operational Demand’ – which is only published on a 30-minute basis – was also at a new low-point this afternoon (2,828MW at 13:30), which is the first month this number has been below 3,000MW:

Note that VIC demand data for 1999 is not ‘apples to apples’ as it excluded the smelter loads in the early periods.

The ‘race to the bottom’ continues…