Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients.
Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.
We’ve just noted the frequency drop on Friday afternoon 31st October 2025, and so take a look at ‘Aggregate Dispatch Error’, to see if it’s likely we are correct in our hypothesis – that this was another instance of frequency weakness due to Semi-Scheduled unit under-performance.
Looking back at system frequency, we see a noticeable drop in system frequency around ~15:45 (NEM time) on Saturday 5th October 2024.
(a) There’s no large trip of a coal unit that coincides
(b) But it *might be* the result of a large collective under-performance (relative to Target) across the Semi-Scheduled fleet NEM-wide ?
I’m not sure if related to the severe weather warnings for both QLD and NSW today, but here’s a quick record of some afternoon weakness in frequency control on Saturday 15th November 2025.
A follow-on to my earlier article of a couple weeks ago, looking at another instance where a team effort was required to counter a drop in system frequency following the loss of generation at a large power station (this time the single unit Kogan Creek power station – the largest single unit in the NEM).
Leave a comment