Weatherzone forecasts possibility of Wind Farm (high wind speed) Cut Outs

A short note for our WattClarity readers just prior to Easter to highlight that Ashleigh Lange has published the article ‘Wind farms facing potential cut outs’ earlier today:

The full article is well worth reading (for our readers here), but the key point appears to be:

‘Late Monday into Tuesday, there are early indications that damaging wind gusts could impact parts of Vic, Tas, NSW and the ACT. These winds could exceed the criteria of 90km/h forcing some wind farms to turn the propellers off and reducing the capacity.  There is still some uncertainty in the strength and location of these damaging winds, due to varying positions of the low.’

Out of curiosity, I opened up the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view and looked at AEMO’s projections of NEM-wide Wind Farm UIGF out in the ST PASA time horizon:

Remember this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ to see ‘that other dimension of time’.

What’s clear in this view are two things:

1)  Out in the ST PASA time horizon, it’s Tuesday afternoon (2nd April 2024) where the forecast for aggregate wind production (or at least, the energy-constrained capability) will be at its highest in this time range;

2)  But that, at only ~4,400MW at the highest point, it’s only just over half of the all-time maximum point (at 8,132MW set in July 2023).  So whilst:

(a)   it might be high wind speeds in some locations (giving a chance of high wind cut-out on some wind farms)

(b)   it won’t be spread across a large enough area to deliver high wind production, in aggregate

Stay tuned to see what actually happens?!