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.
Batteries anyone?
QLD was too slow to install batteries, even just to provide grid stability services, let alone bulk storage to help with evening peaks. Today QLD really needs more batteries than they have or have been announced.
It will also be interesting to see how much the lack of transmission through Wagga Wagga makes this situation worse.