Third short article today to follow the first this afternoon and second earlier this evening.
(A) In the clear for this evening
Quickly noting that it looks like we’re in the clear now this evening, with this snapshot from 20:10 from ez2view highlighting the recovery:
Highlighted units include:
1) Mt Emerald Wind Farm back online (ramped sharply at 17:30 following relaxation of ‘Q_NIL_STRGTH_MEWF’ System Strength constraint, which is private to the Market Participant in real time and so not visible through the afternoon) and Coopers Gap Wind Farm ramping up.
2) Gladstone has 4 units online now (was down to 2 in the immediate aftermath)
3) Stanwell has 3 units up (following a ‘trip to house load’ that occurred in the immediate aftermath).
4) The Queensland ‘Cumulative Price’ has shot up to just under $100,000/MWh … so will have to watch this if price volatility continues in the coming days.
(B) Questions that logically follow…
If we’ve dodged a bullet tonight, then there are two (inter-related) lines of question that logically follow:
(B1) Immediate future implications
First and foremost, we note that the current view is that there’s likely to be high prices through peak demand times tomorrow (Wednesday 26th May) – as we can see in the Forecast Convergence widget from ez2view here:
As highlighted in the snapshot, we note that the forecast is now (i.e. since ~15:31 today) for extreme prices tomorrow evening as well. Flipping to look at ‘Available Generation’ for the QLD region shows that the current forecast is that there will be a unit offline (presumably the Callide unit that had the explosion/fire)
(B2) What happened, and why, and how to prevent in future?
On LinkedIn I noted that CS Energy has posted this:
… which links through to this media statement published this afternoon. There will be many NEM stakeholders keenly awaiting more information…
PS … a rowdy ‘welcome to the NEM’ to new AEMO Chief Executive, Daniel Westerman (who’s been at the helm for 8 days!)
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