So how much did Eraring Power Station supply, of the NSW electricity consumption, over 5 days to 11th May 2024?

The past 8 days have been another topical period in relation to the looming closure of Eraring power station.

1)  For instance, I’ve already noted how ‘Bruce Mountain’s commentary about Eraring (and the Energy Transition) is worth a read’ earlier today.  From my reading, Bruce was trying to make a point that this

2)  Elsewhere, I’ve seen others talk about this period being one of challenging VRE yield, NEM-wide.

In parallel with these inputs, another of our readers called up and reminded me that I’d written ‘So how much did Eraring Power Station supply, of the NSW electricity consumption, at peak demand time on Thursday 29th February 2024?’ back on 29th February 2024, utilising a NEMreview v7 trend.

It was a pretty simple matter to open up the same trend and change the date range to be the 5-day period Monday 6th May to Friday 9th May 2024 inclusive:

Those with a licence to the software can open their own copy of the same trend here and do the same thing at some point in the future…

In comparison to the percentages noted in my article about 29th February, it’s informative to note that for this 5-day period:

1)  Even with 2 units at Eraring offline for unplanned outages (something I’m sure Origin would not have liked, given what eventuated), the minimum percentage of NSW Underlying Demand supplied over this date range by Eraring’s 2 operational units was a low point of 8.76% for the half-hour ending 11:00 on Monday 6th May 2024.

2)  We see through the three periods of volatility (Tue 7th evening, Wed 8th morning and Wed 8th evening) the percentage supplied was in the range 14% to 18%

…. remembering that:

(a)  NSW had run out of the ability to import more energy from both QLD and VIC at this times; and

(b)  Wind harvest in NSW was fairly poor, exacerbated by transmission constraints causing curtailment of some  of the limited resource available.

3)  With the return to service of Eraring unit 3 from late Thursday evening 9th May, the percentage increased.

Another illustration of extreme challenges ahead, if the decision is to close Eraring as currently planned in August 2025!