Whilst we have the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view powered up, it’s useful to tighten the time range (from MT PASA here to ST PASA in this article) to take a look at forecasts for ‘Market Demand’ in South Australia over the coming long weekend.
The reason for the interest is that we’re looking at some hot weather in SA and VIC for the coming long weekend in both locations. here’s temperature forecasts via a Google search for Adelaide:
Related to this I have seen this morning:
1) Joel Pippard at Weatherzone writes ‘Tropics helping add to southern Aus heatwave’ this morning.
2) On ABC yesterday, Harvey Biggs writes ‘Warning to South Australians not to ‘scrimp and save’ on electricity during weekend heatwave’ … an unfortunate reminder of cost of living pressures (and how, especially for some, they overlay on top of debate about this energy transition).
Back to the the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view, however, and in this view I have flipped to ‘chart’ and show two data series – on the top being forecasts for ‘Market Demand’ in South Australia, and on the bottom AEMO’s forecasts for UIGF (i.e the ‘Unconstrained Intermittent Generation Forecast’) for all Wind Farms in the region:
As we see, the evening peaks in ‘Market Demand’ are forecasts to coincide with low points in what looks to be a diurnal cycle in wind output over this time. For rooftop PV and the few Large Solar Farms in SA, they would obviously be trending down to sunset at this time, as well.
Note the ‘Market Demand’ forecasts are up around 2,800MW on all three days noted:
1) Which is still a ways below the all-time record of 3,402MW set in January 2011;
2) But notable all the same because of the very ‘peaky’ nature of the ‘Market Demand’ shape that means it does not get this high very often at all (won’t have been this high since 23rd Feb 2023).
So we’ll watch with interest to see what unfolds …
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