The sun is out again today in Brisbane and that means injections from the growing fleet of rooftop PV power stations has eaten a larger share out of an Underlying Demand number that was already quite low because of the ‘Goldilocks’ weather conditions (not hot enough to drive air-conditioning, or cool enough to drive heating).
That means my SMS alerts have started ringing again today, as noted here:
As noted on the image above, it was only 7 days ago (last Sunday 7th August 2022) that saw a new ‘lowest in recent times, excluding 25th May 2021’ point was reached – for both ‘Market Demand’ (which we keep an eye on) and ‘Operational Demand’ (which AEMO watches). We can see in the messages above that already today we’ve dropped lower still.
At another time we might write about the increasing challenges this type of development will mean for the coming weeks, months and years.
Here’s the 11:20 dispatch interval captured in NEMwatch, with the ‘Market Demand’ for QLD down at 3,469MW rounded up:
As I hit publish for this short article, I see it’s dropped further – to 3,450MW at 11:25 … and is likely to drop further still in the next hour or two.
PS1 – lowest levels achieved
It’s later in the day now, and I can note that the SMS messages lasted from 11:15 through until 13:10 (last message) … so a two hour long spell during which the ‘Market Demand’ was lower than the previous ‘lowest’ point, set just a week ago.
The lowest level by this ‘Market Demand’ measure was:
1) A lowest point of 3,365.23MW at 12:05 … which was only slightly lower than
2) The ‘next lowest’ was 3,367.45MW at 13:00
With the new low point being 3,365MW that is 141MW below the superseded lowest point for ‘Market Demand’ set only last Sunday
Reviewing the AEMO’s ‘Operational Demand’ data, it looks like the lowest point was 3,490MW in the half-hour ending 12:30.
With the new low point being 3,490MW that is 182MW below the superseded lowest point for ‘Operational Demand’ set only last Sunday
PS2 – AEMO confirmation
On Monday 15th August, the AEMO confirmed the new low-point record was reached on Sunday 14th August here on Twitter and here on LinkedIn:
Thanks for that!
That’s all for now…
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