Another spike occurred this afternoon at 16:15 (to $1,003.94/MWh). With low wind conditions persisting and imports from VIC significantly constraints because of the outage reflected in the ‘I-VS_050’ constraint set through until Saturday evening (but then back on 10th May), will prices bounce again as soon as the sun’s gone?
Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients.
Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.
A preliminary look at a number of events that happened today, leading to prices spiking to the Market Price Cap in a number of regions, Demand Side Response being very active, and trading desks being very busy.
Coincidentally today, David Osmond has posted about ‘another challenging week’ for VRE NEM-wide (a week beginning Wed 8th May 2024 – the day NSW hit the Cumulative Price Threshold).
Taking a quick look at the dispatch interval through this period of low aggregate wind harvest that also saw lowest aggregate VRE (Wind + Large Solar).
Inertia is an important concept to understand as the technology mix in the NEM evolves during the energy transition. In this article, Jonathon Dyson talks about the importance of inertia and highlights an example of a specific incident where we observed relatively low levels of inertia in the NEM.
1 Commenton "A spike at 16:15 hints at volatility to resume in SA with the sun setting, on Thursday 4th May 2023"
Why did small-scale solar drop off vertically at around 1600 hours but not large-scale solar??