Apart from a burst of hot weather on two hot-and-high-demand days in Queensland on Thu 28th Dec 2023 and Fri 29th Dec 2023, it’s been a pretty mild summer 2023-24 to date (at least temperature wise). Is that going to change?
On Tuesday morning 16th January 2024 the AEMO published Market Notice 113308 relating to a Local Temperature Alert at Dalby in southern Queensland:
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MARKET NOTICE
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From : AEMO
To : NEMITWEB1
Creation Date : 16/01/2024 10:18:38
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Notice ID : 113308
Notice Type ID : GENERAL NOTICE
Notice Type Description : Subjects not covered in specific notices
Issue Date : 16/01/2024
External Reference : NEM Local Temperature Alerts for QLD from 16 Jan 2024 to 20 Jan 2024
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Reason :
AEMO ELECTRICITY MARKET NOTICE
AEMO’s weather service provider has issued forecast temperatures equal to or greater than the NEM Local Temperature Alert Levels for listed weather stations below.
QLD
Dalby Ap (37+ Deg C): 18th Jan
The NEM Local Temperature Alert Levels are:
Launceston Ti Tree Bend: 33 Deg C, Dalby Airport: 37 Deg C, for all other selected weather stations: 39 Deg C.
AEMO requests Market Participants to:
1. review the weather forecast in the local area where their generating units / MNSP converter stations are located and,
2. if required, update the available capacity in their dispatch offers or availability submissions consistent with the forecast temperatures.
Further information is available at:
AEMO Operations Planning
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END OF REPORT
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As noted at the page linked above, the AEMO issues these alerts because:
1) pretty much all types of generation plant can be adversely affected by high temperatures …
(a) as illustrated (with real data) in the article ‘Extreme temperature effects on generation supply technology’ from 11th February 2020.
(b) that article used data from the GRC2018
(c) but remember that, since then, we’ve included stats for each individual unit on the ‘B’ Page of each year’s edition of the Generator Statistical Digest:
i. Such as illustrated here for the GSD2022 (released just under a year ago today); and
ii. To come soon in the GSD2023.
2) The AEMO requires the operators of these plant to ‘bid in’ realistic capabilities of these units under high temperature conditions, when they are forecast to occur
… such as is the case above for the Dalby area of southern Queensland for this Thursday.
3) Given the temperature alert is for the Dalby area, this alert could potentially be relevant to plant such as:
(a) peaking units, like the Braemar A and Braemar B stations.
(b) combined cycle units, like Darling Downs CCGT
(c) coal units like Tarong.
(d) solar plant, like Oakey 1 and Oakey 2 solar farm; and also
(e) wind farms, like Coopers Gap wind farms
(f) batteries, like Wandoan.
In parallel with these high temperature alerts, we have noticed that AEMO was forecasting LOR2 (and LOR1) tight supply-demand balance warnings for the Queensland region … as shown here in this snapshot for the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view from 11:25 today (Tue 16th Jan 2024) looking forwards:
Remember that this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ to see ‘that other dimension of time’.
Note that these warnings were cancelled in the ST PASA forecast run published at 09:00 this morning.
Out of curiosity I opened up this pre-configured 14-day view for the Queensland region (7 days back, 7 days forwards) from ez2view online to see what’s forecast in terms of Market Demand, and also Available Generation:
Readers with their own licence to the ez2view software can open their own copy of this query in a browser here.
We see that ‘Market Demand’ levels above 9,500MW* are currently being forecast for the evenings of Thursday 18th, Friday 19th and Monday 22nd January 2024.
* Readers should keep in mind that the all-time record (by that measure) currently sits at 10,119MW … set for the dispatch interval ending 17:30 on Tuesday 8th March 2022.
That’s more like what we’d expect to see for summer 2023-24.
The weather forecast for the SE QLD doesn’t look that bad or abnormal for this time of year. That still doesn’t mean the QLD grid isn’t going to have troubles. Their lack of utility scale batteries and wind based generation really hurts them at this time of the year.