Electricity Demand in Victoria on Monday 16th December 2024 reached quite high levels … but they were not ‘all time maximum’ (i.e if looking at ‘Market Demand’ or ‘Grid Demand’ … though Allan points out they may have been, if looking at ‘Underlying Demand’)
Two of the common measures of demand reached yesterday were as follows:
1) AEMO (and NEMMCO beforehand) has been publishing the ‘TOTAL DEMAND’ metric since the start of the NEM (as it’s a central input into the NEMDE dispatch and price setting process).
(a) It’s for that reason that we refer to it as ‘Market Demand’
(b) Looking at what happened yesterday, the ‘Market Demand’ peaked at 9,887MW in the five-minute dispatch interval ending 17:00 (NEM time)
2) AEMO (and NEMMCO beforehand) has also been producing, an ‘after the fact’ calculation of ‘Operational Demand’ as a proxy for the rate of consumption (remembering MW is a rate) supplied by visible* supply sources on the grid.
* i.e. excluding a range of invisible supply sources, with the big one now being rooftop PV.
(a) but not back to the start of the NEM, and the only data set we have accessible from the AEMO is of 30-minute cadence and only extends back to December 2014 (i.e. there’s only 10 years of history, whereas the NEM has just clocked over its 26th birthday)
(b) Looking at what happened yesterday, the ‘Operational Demand’ peaked at 9,851MW in the 30-minute period ending 17:00 (NEM time).
Opening up the ‘Trends Engine’ within ez2view and querying these two data series back to the start of the NEM, we see the following
So the key take-aways for me are:
1) Whilst peak demand levels in Victoria on Monday 16th December 2024 were quite high
2) They are well below the ‘all time maximum levels’ looking back to the start of the NEM, with standouts being:
(a) 10,277MW for ‘Market Demand’ in January 2014
(b) 10,496MW as highest ever for ‘Market Demand’ at 12:35 on 29th January 2009 (a day many will still remember, and which we wrote about)
Note that I’ve also included ‘Demand and Non-Scheduled Generation’, which is yet one more measure of demand.
One more key takeaway Paul – if we add rooftop PV estimates to operational demand to get underlying demand (ie a measure of total power consumption from all sources), then yesterday’s half hourly values peaked at about 10,600 MW, higher than market demand in Jan 2009 when there was no rooftop PV to speak of, and almost certainly higher than peak underlying demand in Jan 2014 when there might have been a hundred-odd MW of rooftop PV output, if that, at the time of peak market demand.
Since yesterday was not the culmination of a multi-day heatwave here in Victoria, this does point to a material rise in underlying peak consumption – not surprising given population growth etc.
Good pickup, thanks Allan!