Forecast evening IRPM next week healthy … despite ‘ferocious Tasman Low’

When you see a news article about a ‘ferocious Tasman Low’ such as in Ben Domensino’s article ‘Ferocious Tasman Low to hit southeast Australia next week’ yesterday, it’s hard not to open and have a look!

Given (as we wrote years ago in the GRC2018) that the NEM is ‘increasingly dependent on the weather’ I assume we’re not alone in paying increasing attention to information such as this.  From Ben’s article we wondered:

1)  The forecast is for cold weather … how will this affect ‘Market Demand’?

2)  The forecast high winds (albeit moreso offshore) might deliver higher wind yield.

… but in the light of ongoing use of gas in gas-fired generation (such as Tamar Valley CCGT these past 5 weeks) and concerns raised by some about gas storage levels at Iona and production levels at Longford (such as discussed by Colin Packham here), I thought I’d quickly access this trend chart from ez2view to look at forecast levels of ‘Market Demand’ and NEM-wide IRPM for the coming week:

Short story is:

1)  Some similarities for the coming week as we saw on Tuesday 2nd July and Wednesday 3rd July;

2)  As in, ‘Market Demand’ at evening peak up around 22,500MW

3)  But we see the forecast forward is that:

(a)  NEM-wide IRPM for Monday 15th July, Tuesday 16th July and Wednesday 17th July forecast not even to drop below 20%; whilst

(a)  NEM-wide IRPM for Thursday 18th July forecast to drop (just) below 20%;

(c)  but not even to the levels of Tuesday 2nd July and Wednesday 3rd July (and certainly not to the lower points seen in June).