Late yesterday afternoon the AEMO took the unusual step of releasing a media statement to note that the LOR3 notice for NSW had been downgraded to an LOR2:
“AEMO can confirm that forecast electricity reserves have improved in New South Wales this Wednesday.
As a result, the previously forecast Lack of Reserve Level 3 (LOR3) has been downgraded to a less critical Lack of Reserve Level 2 (LOR2). This improvement is largely due to the cancellation of transmission outages in the region.
AEMO remains focused on maintaining electricity reliability in both New South Wales and Queensland this week, as high temperatures are expected to drive strong energy demand amid significant generation unavailability in NSW.
If electricity supply forecasts deteriorate, AEMO will take all necessary measures, including the activation of off-market reserves, to ensure supply reliability.”
The press release came after several news articles were published earlier in the day – we noted that many of these headlines contained the word ‘blackout’. We’ve collated the list below of all such article that we spotted:
- Tim Foley, of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote Blackout risk: State on alert due to hot weather, coal plant outages
- Peter Hannam, of The Guardian wrote Blackout risk warning as scorching temperatures forecast for parts of NSW
- Tom Saunders and Brianna Perkins, of the ABC wrote Energy market operator warns of potential blackouts across the state, with NSW and Sydney expected to swelter
- Angela Macdonald-Smith, of the AFR wrote Blackout risk lingers in NSW as coal outages hit
- Perry Williams, of the Australian wrote Heat spike puts NSW power grid on edge
The screenshot below has been taken from our Forecast Convergence widget within ez2view, and was taken just after 11am this morning. It shows how the LOR forecasts in NSW over the next few days have been changing.
Read this page, if you need a refresher on the LOR conditions and the methodology.
Forecast convergence of LOR conditions in NSW for the next 96 hours. Columns represent point in time, rows represent the recency of the forecast.
Source: ez2view’s Forecast Convergence widget
Whilst we see that the forecast LOR3 has been downgraded for tomorrow afternoon, forecast LOR2 conditions remain present for long periods over the course of the next 3 days. Meanwhile, as of this morning, we see a new forecast LOR3 condition is now appearing for Thursday afternoon.
Hi Dan – Thursday is looking really tight, with a ~16h LOR2. Curiously, about 5h of that LOR2 is sitting at exactly 0 MW reserve under the latest STPASA. Do you or the WC team have an explanation for what’s providing that balancing – it looks almost to be a market loadshedding mechanism that acts before forced loadshedding?
G’day Tom (and Peter who has also commented below). We’ve fielded the same question from someone else – and a member of our team also observed that behaviour.
The STPASA process description says: “The linear programming formulation attempts to optimise reserve sharing between regions along with other constraints which are described later in this document to maximise the amount of reserve that is available to the system as a whole.”
We are not 100% sure, but another member of our team suggests that it could be that the model judges that there is benefit to leaving one region fairly ‘thin’ on reserves if the excess can be of benefit to a neighbouring region.
Excellent question Tom!
You reap what you sow… Good luck. I’m insulated from this crap