There’s been a solid block of windy weather triggering weather warnings in recent days and, more specific to the NEM, meaning another increase to the ‘all time maximum instantaneous NEM-wide’ record set only a couple weeks ago.
Here’s a snapshot captured this morning looking back a-day-and-a-bit to highlight the new peak at 7,305MW set as InitialMW for the 20:50 dispatch interval Thursday evening 4th August … so metered at 20:45:
This new ‘highest ever’ point was almost 200MW higher than the level of 7,111MW set for the 21:50 dispatch interval on Saturday 16th July 2022.
There was also an interim bump to 7,253MW on 3rd August that I did not write about as well.
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Bit of a coincidence that the new record level was set at the same time as the Albanese Government’s new climate legislation passed in the lower house … but also food for thought as well.
As I have noted before, the NEM is fast becoming a market (and a machine) that both extremes are going to matter increasingly :
1) so whilst we should celebrate these highest points,
2) we should still remember (as illustrated here and in other articles) that the minimum points each month are still stubbornly low and (as we showed in Appendix 27 within GenInsights21 should always be expected to be that way, no matter how much wind capacity we build and how widely it is spread).
The design of the NEM 2.0 we arrive at through the current process on the Capacity Market and through other initiatives needs to ensure there’s always enough dispatchable capacity to cater for these lulls, whether short term or rarer longer-term ‘wind droughts’.
Unless the residential market is required to use wholesale linked rates, there is little incentive for households to change their use patterns or invest in reducing their consumption through better efficiency such as insulation. Without this change to wholesale linked rates, we are all going to pay more due to greater storage and transmission requirements.
Craig, What sort of storage do you have in mind, considering that Snowy2.0 is a long way off and batteries do not have grid-scale capacity?
Due to the fact which Paul and others have noted regarding the intractably low production at the bottom end of the wind scale we have probably gone as far as we can go to get rid of coal until there is a radically new storage vehicle available or nuclear power is on deck.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/energy-policy-where-parallel-universes-are-set-to-collide/