Spot price up in QLD and NSW, with only 1,532MW of spare capacity Monday evening 12th July

A quick note with a snapshot from NEMwatch v10 highlighting the 17:30 dispatch interval that’s indicating

As noted on the image, there was just over 1,500MW of spare capacity (at any price) bid into the NSW and QLD regions together and an IRPM for the QLD+NSW ‘Economic Island’ down at only 8%!

A couple reasons why this spare capacity is low:

1)  We see in the chart at the bottom right there is barely any wind generation across QLD and NSW together …

2)  … and (naturally at this time during winter) no solar as well;

3)  That’s on the back of ongoing outages of coal plant as discussed here before.

In the Market Notice window we can see AEMO noting actual LOR1 Low Reserve Condition warning for the NSW  region as at 17:17.

For the 17:35 dispatch interval that followed:

1)  the prices shot up further (around $14,000/MWh for both QLD and NSW), and

2)  the AEMO also published another Market Notice announcing actual LOR1 Low Reserve Condition warning for the QLD region as well.

The lower prices in VIC and TAS (and even SA) indicate that there’d be a dampening effect if that lower priced power could get into NSW … but the ‘N::N_CNCW_2’ constraint equation (visible in ez2view, but not shown here) is not only limiting exports VIC to NSW … but also, in this snapshot above for 17:30, making NSW export south the VIC.

1)  This constraint is related to a network outage on ‘Canberra-Capital (6) line Or Capital-Kangaroo Valley (3W) line, stability limit (Snowy-NSW) for loss of Yass-Marulan (4/5) or Gullen Range to Bannaby (61) 330kV line 330kV line’

2)  It’s part of the ‘N-KVCW_3W_15M’ constraint set, with the outage currently scheduled to continue until the afternoon of 24th July 2021.

3)  Clients with their own copy of ez2view can explore further…

Would be an interesting case study to review tomorrow the bidding behaviour of all of the units on the LHS of that constraint!