Last week we wrote ‘Curtailment (spillage) of Large Solar reaches 2/3 of total resource, on Saturday 24th August 2024’.
Well, with NSW seeing a substantial drop in ‘minimum demand’ point on Sunday 1st September 2024, it was natural to wonder what it meant in terms of curtailment of Large Solar across the NEM (noting is only determined for Semi-Scheduled units and not for the couple smaller Non-Scheduled units). So, taking the same query from the ‘Trends Engine’ in ez2view – but adding in an explicit calculation for ‘% curtailment (i.e. of the capability at the time)’ in blue, we see some pretty startling numbers:
We see:
1) Curtailment (mainly due to economic curtailment, we suspect) on Saturday 24th August 2024 actually exceeded 70% briefly … a bit higher than our 66% eyeball estimate
2) Over the recent weekend the numbers are worse still:
(a) On Saturday 31st August 2024 we see curtailment levels approach 74%
(b) Yesterday (Sunday 1st September 2024) we see curtailment levels reach 79.2%.
... rooftop PV* is killing its big brother!
* amongst other factors … like the ongoing dispatch of coal, at least in part for its ‘Keeping the Lights on Services’ that are not yet replaced.
Yikes!
1) Who’d want to build a new (stand-alone) Large Solar Farm in the NEM?
2) Bargain basement prices for anyone trying to sell one, as well?
3) Should the designers of the Capacity Investment Scheme be considering only providing support for solar projects if they are developed as fully Scheduled hybrid projects?
… this was something discussed in GenInsights Quarterly Updates for 2024 Q2.
While these are one off events, the trend is definitely there. There are unlikely to be anymore large utility scale solar farms that don’t have a very large battery with them. This of course is due to the large amounts of “excess” solar in the grid, the lower cost of batteries and the change in regulations that now allows hybrid systems.
The smart money is, or should be, building MEM-attached [battery] storage that store power when prices are negative, and kick in during 4 to 9pm when we all pay the time-of-day premium tariff.
I wonder if anyone is doing this?
The time to build solar farms was back in the 2010s or earlier.
According to Prof. Simshauser’s modelling, rooftop PV is basically forcing the shutdown of coal plants, otherwise the NEM will become unstable, (or evening tariffs are going to get very, very high to compensate!)