An inter-regional interconnector refers to *the whole of* the transmission path between RRNs

We already noted this a few times recently (such as in relation to ‘VIC1-NSW1 interconnector unable to Target Flow north, on Thursday afternoon-evening 7th November 2024’), but we thought it would be worth separating out as its own article under the ‘Energy Literacy’ category, as it’s likely we’ll be referring back to it increasingly in future.

At Global-Roam Pty Ltd we’re probably partly to blame for this confusion (in putting together NEMwatch version 1 way back in 2000), in showing interconnectors in our software as effectively just hanging over each side of the inter-regional boundaries … whereas the way they work within NEMDE is as a concatenation of the entire flow path between the two relevant Regional Reference Nodes (RRNs).

As an example of this, consider this review of ‘… the ‘N-MNYS_5_WG_CLOSE’ Constraint Set, as a major factor in recent northern volatility’. (a network outage that’s still quite topical given less-than-rosy forecasts for Monday 25th and Tuesday 26th November in the NSW region).