A quick look at Saturday 11th April (Easter Saturday) where there were major reductions in output at 4 units across Victoria – 3 coal units in the Latrobe Valley and the Macarthur Wind Farm out in western Victoria, probably related.
Our guest author Stephen Sproul looks at how the Dalrymple Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), currently the only source of virtual inertia on the NEM, responded to the November 2019 SA islanding event.
In her first article for WattClarity, Marcelle looks at questions raised in the recent summer on the forecasting of performance at high temperatures of wind and solar generators, and asks how AEMO and industry can work together to improve this.
This started as a consideration of how applicable ‘change of electricity demand’ is as a general metric for communicating the impact of coronavirus (and measures taken to address it). However it is morphed into some considerations much broader than the energy sector…
Guest author, Allan O’Neil tries to piece together further detail of what is intended with the apparent tightening of the Reliability Standard (which has sat at 0.002% USE for many years).
Like everyone else, we’re grappling with how COVID-19 will impact on us personally – and also in terms of what we do at work. Here’s a few initial thoughts about the types of impacts (and risks to manage) in relation to the National Electricity Market.
An article published by AEMC on the ‘value of dispatchability’ provided the spur to return to our intention of freely sharing insights gleaned from the Generator Statistical Digest 2019. Today’s article highlighting the value of dispatchability.
Alarms in one of our NEMwatch dashboards alerted me to the plunging level of Scheduled Demand seen this afternoon in the the Victorian and South Australian regions of the NEM – a new record low point for South Australia.
Last week saw more in a growing series of exits, and asset write-downs, amongst new entrants in the supply of renewable energy within the NEM. Today on WattClarity I ponder whether we have been setting them up to fail due to the nature of support provided to these new entrants. What is your perspective?
Another islanding event separated the SA region from the rest of the NEM yesterday (Monday, 2nd of March). Allan O’Neil investigates what happened before the event and possible causes.
As time has permitted, I’ve invested some time to prepare this first stage of a review of what went on during the period from 31st Jan 2020 to 17th Feb 2020 – a period during which the South Australian region formed its own frequency island following the transmission line damage. A period we’ve called an ‘accelerated accidental experiment’.
Two weeks ago (Monday 17th February) a ‘temporary fix’ was put in place to reconnect SA with VIC following the transmission line outage that began on 31st January 2020. Well, we’ve islanded again today….
A back-dated article, looking back at the two ERM rule change requests which, when passed by the AEMC, had great effect in expanding transparency in the NEM in relation to generator availabilities from 20th August 2020.
Jonathon Dyson of Greenview Strategic Consulting uses the Generator Statistical Digest to highlight FCAS revenue results, contingency recovery and regulation costs for 2019, and help explain why it is critical for us all to understand FCAS.
Guest author, Allan O’Neil, takes a look at what’s happened in the (islanded) market for FCAS services in South Australia over the past two weeks with Heywood out of service. He notes:
“generators in SA as a group would have paid out roughly twice in contingency raise FCAS costs what they earned from selling energy”
Summer 2019-20 is not yet done, but already we have seen some extremes in temperature in different places – which have led to different concerns. Today I use the GRC2018 and GSD2019 to take a look at what the implications for this actually are.
Investing some time over the weekend with a some higher-speed data on output of rooftop solar PV systems across VIC and SA reveals some interesting observations about what happened on Friday 31st January 2020 in conjunction with the transmission damage and Heywood trip.
Guest author, Allan O’Neil delves further into understanding what happened in response to the transmission tower failures on 31st January 2020 that sent system frequency in South Australia and led to a large reversal of flows.
It feels like a lifetime ago, already, but I do vaguely remember that we released our Generator Statistical Digest 2019 last week, on Tuesday 28th January 2020. All the tasks that I had scheduled to follow on from that launch…
Cautioning readers that I am a novice at reading frequency data in this manner, I take a first look at how the frequency in Melbourne and South Australia varied at the time of the transmission outage at 13:24:30 on Friday 31st January 2020.