Earlier this morning, we posted ‘Friday morning forecasts for load shedding (i.e. LOR3) in NSW on Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th December grow more extreme’ and promised to take a look at ‘what’s changed?’.

That’s what we’ll do in this article

1)  particularly referring back to what we posted ~24 hours ago in ‘A first look into the LOR3 (a.k.a. ‘load shedding’) forecast for NSW on Monday 16th December 2024’

2)  in that article we drew on a number of widgets in ez2view … here we’ll use many of the same widgets to look at what’s changed.

LORx forecasts extended to include Tasmania!

It was a bit of a surprise this morning to also see MN121823 published shortly (speaking about forecast LOR2 in Tasmania) after the two Market Notices copied into ‘Friday morning forecasts for load shedding (i.e. LOR3) in NSW on Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th December grow more extreme’:

‘——————————————————————-
MARKET NOTICE
——————————————————————-

From :              AEMO
To   :              NEMITWEB1
Creation Date :     13/12/2024     05:12:23

——————————————————————-

Notice ID               :         121823
Notice Type ID          :         RESERVE NOTICE
Notice Type Description :         LRC/LOR1/LOR2/LOR3
Issue Date              :         13/12/2024
External Reference      :         STPASA – Forecast Lack Of Reserve Level 2 (LOR2) in the TAS Region on 16/12/2024

——————————————————————-

Reason :

AEMO ELECTRICITY MARKET NOTICE

AEMO declares a Forecast LOR2 condition under clause 4.8.4(b) of the National Electricity Rules for the TAS region for the following period:

[1.] From 1800 hrs 16/12/2024 to 1830 hrs 16/12/2024.
The forecast capacity reserve requirement is 119 MW.
The minimum capacity reserve available is 77 MW.

AEMO is seeking a market response.

AEMO has not yet estimated the latest time it would need to intervene through an AEMO intervention event.

Manager NEM Real Time Operations

——————————————————————-
END OF REPORT
——————————————————————-’

… I can’t remember (ever?) seeing forecast LOR2 in Tasmania (perhaps one of our WattClarity readers focused on TAS can confirm this for us?), so that is part of what made it jump out to me!

As we see in this snapshot of (three copies of) the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget, :

1)  they all line up for Monday 16th December 2024 … with the forecast LOR3 in NSW and the forecast LOR2  in Victoria and TAS:

2)  whilst Tuesday 17th December 2024 sees the heat pass out of VIC and TAS and center on NSW.

Readers are reminded that this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.

Demand forecasts remain high

Next, we’ll flip the montage to look at forecasts for ‘Market Demand’ for NSW, VIC and NEM-wide:

Compared to the forecasts summarised 24 hours ago, we see that…

1)  forecast peak ‘Market Demand’ for NSW is slightly higher (only a few MW)

2)  but compared to the snapshot taken at 10:25 yesterday for forecast NEM-wide demand (which at the time topped out at 33,145MW) we see the snapshot above (peaking at 33,618MW) would be considerably higher.

~600MW drop in Forecast Available Generation

Next, we’ll flip the montage to look at forecasts for ‘Available Generation’ in the ST PASA look-ahead for NSW:

We’ve highlighted a drop of ~600MW that occurred between the ST PASA runs for 07:00 and 08:00 yesterday.  My suspicion is that this is due to the removal of capacity for the BW02 unit, which (readers might recall) we added into yesterday’s article just prior to publication.

We see in the ‘Generator Outages’ widget above, filtered for coal units, that the BW02 unit is now expected to be offline until Sunday 22nd December 2024.  I’ve not looked into what the reason for the outage is – perhaps not relevant, given it seems certain the unit won’t be back in time for Monday or Tuesday next week.

Some improvements for VRE forecasts

Next, we’ll take an updated look at forecast UIGF for Solar and then Wind (remembering that capability was looking pretty ordinary 24 hours ago).

Slight improvement in Solar Capability

One needs to squint a bit with this view of forecast UIGF for Solar in NSW (at 08:25 NEM time), but it does look like:

1)  Whilst Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th still obviously look poor in capability compared to today (say);

2)  There’s been some slight improvement (e.g. forecast slightly less cloud cover?) for Monday and Tuesday afternoons.

… and that’s a good thing.

Watch this space, for Wind Capability

Here’s a similar view of forecast UIGF for Wind in NSW (at 08:25 NEM time):

We see here that ‘out of the blue’ there’s been a burst of stronger wind forecast for NSW from the ST PASA run for 10:00 yesterday … but this currently lies between the two periods of greatest concern.

So clearly a ‘watch this space’.

Some movement in network outages …

Here’s an updated view of the ‘Constraint Sets’ widget, which provides a Gantt-chart style view of the planned invocation of Constraint Sets.  Again we’ve included two copies (top and bottom) with the top view filtered to just the outage-related constraint sets pertaining to the 330kV network feeding in to the Sydney RRN from the southern half of the NSW region:

Let’s talk briefly about the two particular constraint sets highlighted.

Earlier RTS on the current Line 82 outage

Compared to the note ~24 hours ago we see that the line 82 outage (between Liddell and Tomago) has shifted such that it’s now expected to be returned to service on Sunday, rather than Monday morning.

Here’s the current view (at 09:30 NEM time) of the ‘Constraint Set Details’ widget for the ‘N-LDTM_82’ constraint set:

The elephant in the room (the Line 17 outage!)

What’s not changed (at least at this point) is the planned invocation of the ‘N-X_AVMA_KCTX’ constraint set.   Here’s the current view (at 09:35 NEM time) of the ‘Constraint Set Details’ widget for the ‘N-X_AVMA_KCTX’ constraint set:

Note that the last time this constraint set was invoked was 17th January 2023, 18th January 2023 and 19th January 2023.

We expect that this outage will be cancelled or deferred … it has just not been yet.

Other significant (non coal) Firming Capacity

For what it’s worth, here’s another snapshot of the the ‘Generator Outages’ widget (at 08:35 NEM time) filtered down to show non-coal units in NSW, VIC and QLD that are above 169MW* in Maximum Capacity:

 * a number partly chosen so all units are visible.

Note:

1)  The outages at Tallawarra A, and Colongra unit 1, and Mckay Hydro

2)  The commissioning of Waratah BESS.