Forecast supply-demand for NSW for Thursday evening 14th December 2023 remains tight

Yesterday, Dan Lee noted how ‘AEMO requests generator recall information in NSW and QLD for this Thursday 14th December 2023’.

… shorthand was that the forecast supply-demand balance was that it would be quite tight!

Today at 12:57 (NEM time) they published Market Notice 112241 as follows:

——————————————————————-
MARKET NOTICE
——————————————————————-

From :              AEMO
To   :              NEMITWEB1
Creation Date :     13/12/2023     12:57:30

——————————————————————-

Notice ID               :         112241
Notice Type ID          :         RESERVE NOTICE
Notice Type Description :         LRC/LOR1/LOR2/LOR3
Issue Date              :         13/12/2023
External Reference      :         PDPASA – Forecast Lack Of Reserve Level 2 (LOR2) in the NSW Region on 14/12/2023

——————————————————————-

Reason :

AEMO ELECTRICITY MARKET NOTICE

AEMO declares a Forecast LOR2 condition under clause 4.8.4(b) of the National Electricity Rules for the NSW region for the following Period:

[1.] From 1530 hrs 14/12/2023 to 1930 hrs 14/12/2023.
The forecast capacity reserve requirement is 1259 MW.
The minimum capacity reserve available is 344 MW.

AEMO is seeking a market response.

AEMO has not yet estimated the latest time at which it would need to intervene through an AEMO intervention event.

Manager NEM Real Time Operations

——————————————————————-
END OF REPORT
——————————————————————-

With my copy of ez2view I’ve prepared this collage of three different views of the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget*, all focused on NSW and looking out the P30 and ST PASA time horizon:

* remembering that this widget enables the user to ‘look up a vertical’ to see ‘that other dimension of time’.

With respect to the numbered annotations:

1)  The forecast LOR2 Low Reserve Condition warning (shown in orange) is stubbornly remaining around (and for a 4-hour period as shown above in the Market Notice).

2)  We see the forecast for ‘Market Demand’ tomorrow evening in NSW is that it will be slightly above 13,000MW:

(a)  Which would be ~1,500MW below the all-time record (which was 14,649MW during February 2011);

(b)  But has not been above 13,000MW since March 2023 … and before that February 2020.

3)  With respect to Available Generation capacity, see the daily ramp down in available generation capacity (due to solar going to bed) that coincides with the expected peak in ‘Market Demand’ … an indication of the tricky balancing act that AEMO will be watching closely tomorrow.

Here’s a filtered view of the ‘Generator Outages’ widget looking just at Scheduled plant inside of NSW:

The view is filtered down to NSW plant and then sorted from big to small down the page:

1)  Apart from Mt Piper 2, which appears to be on an Unplanned Forced Outage, the big units are all available – and planned to be tomorrow (in the stale MT PASA DUID Availability data).

2)  Next notable non-green colour is Tallawarra B under ‘Basic Planned Outage’ due to commissioning

3)  One step down is for Shoalhaven generator:

(a)  Which is automatically coded red because of the stale MT PASA data;

(b)  but arguably that should really be green for today as it has reached up to 162MW peak output at 12:25 today.

4)  Below those units, the size is significantly smaller.

So will watch with interest tomorrow.