I was away for a bit recently, and so Dan wrote about how the ‘NEM-wide wind production record broken twice last weekend. New record as of Sunday 25th of June 2023’.
Since that time we’ve also seen a relative lull pass through on 3rd and 4th July, which this time coincided with low solar NEMwide as well (part of the ongoing yin-and-yang of VRE that we’ve been writing about for years – such as in this animation from 2015 using NEMwatch snapshots for South Australia).
Glancing at this Dashboard view of past and forecast future wind production, I happened to notice a new burst of activity that is (currently) forecast to culminate in a level that would be a new all-time max (up at 7,471MW at 05:30 on Saturday 8th July):
Keep in mind that things can change in the ~36 hours between now and then… such as:
1) The ‘Availability’ for Wind might end up lower than current expectations:
(a) Because the wind might actually drop away; or
(b) Because the AEMO forecast might be ‘wrong’;
(c) Note that (because of the time frame) the self-forecasting games that are being played don’t feed into this current question.
2) The wind ‘Availability’ might be there, but wind farm Output might be curtailed for various reasons
… as discussed here on 24th June (with links to earlier analysis as well).
Note that I’ve now re-published this trend (initially developed in ez2view online using this Trend Template (where you can edit your own copy)) such that all registered users should be able to access this at this Dashboards URL (you just won’t be able to edit etc).
PS1 update on forecasts from Friday afternoon 7th July
For those interested readers, I’ve dropped in this snapshot from ez2view v9.7.3.4 ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget from 14:40 on Friday afternoon 7th July showing successive iterations of the AEMO’s forecasts for NEM-wide wind capability:
Remembering you can use this widget to ‘look up a vertical’ and see ‘the other dimension of time’ we can clearly see AEMO’s forecast wind capability is continuing to trend towards what would have the capability of being a new all-time maximum.
PS2 quite likely there will be curtailment
In this thread on LinkedIn, Sarah Lawley asked this question:
To reiterate, it’s worth readers noting that it’s quite likely there will be curtailment … because these peaks in wind capability will be through Friday night into Saturday morning, when demand will be relatively low. Here’s the same ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget looking at NEM-wide ‘Market Demand’ highlighting the low levels forecast:
In other words, with demand low right across the NEM (i.e. 18,000-21,000MW through several hours) and wind capability around 7,500MW it’s likely that there will be price-based curtailment…
(a) Even before the sun rises; and
(b) not even starting to think about network congestion.
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