Stockyard Hill Wind Farm briefly off again, on Thu 22nd February 2024 (constraints a factor)

There are bushfires in TAS impacting on transmission capacity, and bushfires in SA impacting on transmission capacity – and there’s plenty of news articles about bushfires in VIC as well (unfortunately)

… stay safe, everyone.

We’ve recently written about how bushfires led to Stockyard Hill Wind Farm rapidly coming offline on Tuesday 13th February 2024 (before the ‘main event’ that we called Event 2 on the day), so it’s worth a quick note to say ez2view alerts earlier today flagged a big reduction in output at STOCKYD1 in the 16:00 dispatch interval (NEM time).

This is shown here in the ‘Unit Dashboard’ widget snapped at 17:10 … noting that it also shows the unit ramping back up shortly afterwards:

Note that ‘current day’ data is limited in a Public MMS.

However the CPD Price shown for the DUID in the 16:00 dispatch interval (i.e. being below the Market Floor Price of –$1,000/MWh suggests that the unit is being ‘constrained off’ in this case … due to the ‘V>>X_MLSY_MLGT_MLGT’ constraint equation, which we show here in the ‘Constraint Dashboard’ widget:

In this case we see that:

1)  the STOCKYD1 unit is towards the top of the list of units shown (i.e. with a large positive LHS factor), which means that it would likely be ‘constrained down’ before units lower down in the list.

2)  Indeed we see the three DUNDWFx units are also at 0MW (slightly above, perhaps SCADA error?)

3)  There’s initially a bit of mystery about MACARTH1, which is still producing, but a quick look in its own ‘Unit Dashboard’ widget reveals that:

(a)  It was offline in the next dispatch interval; and that

(b)  its bid ROCDOWN rate yesterday was 12MW/min (i.e. 60MW in a dispatch interval), so we deduce it was probably just ‘constrained down’ to the limit of its ROCDOWN rate in this instance.

Nothing more, at this point …