Forecast ‘Market Demand’ for QLD on Friday 24th Jan 2025 approaching all-time maximum

Readers here, and QLD residents, might recall how Monday 22nd January 2024 saw a massive new all-time record for ‘Market Demand’ in the Queensland region.

… we wrote quite a number of articles about that day, all collated here on WattClarity.  They key point being the new all-time-max demand was 11,036MW by that measure.

So it’s a bit of a coincidence to open up this 14-day trend using the ‘Trends Engine’ inside of ez2view this morning (Tuesday 21st January 2025) to see the following forecast for the week ahead:

We note that the current forecast for ‘Market Demand’ in the STPASA time horizon is that it might be up at 10,897MW at the half-hour period ending 17:30 on Friday 24th January 2025.  That would be only 139MW below the all-time maximum set a year ago.

For more context, we open up the ‘Forecast Convergence’ view of QLD’s ‘Market Demand’ in ez2view at the 09:05 dispatch interval on Tuesday 21st January 2025:

Ordinarily we show the ‘Grid’ view* utilising ‘Auto-scale’ on the colour bands, but in this case we have chosen a manual range from 10,500MW to 11,211MW in order to see the upper bound.

* which allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’

We see that the demand forecast has moderated somewhat compared to forecasts (for Thursday) published on Sunday 19th January … where the forecast for Thursday was that it might have been up to 11,211MW … which would have been a new all-time record.