Wednesday 12th February 2025 could be a big day for ‘Market Demand’ in South Australia

I’ve a few things left to do today, but it was impossible not to become ‘distracted’ when seeing a headline from DTN (formerly Weatherzone) stating ‘NEM braces for hottest day in 5 years’:

2025-02-11-LinkedIn-DTN-forecast-hottest-day

Note in the text that follows they clarify that this is with respect to South Australia for Wednesday 12th February 2025 (and a big hint was in the image) – with the LinkedIn teaser passing through to the longer article ‘NEM braces for the hottest day in over 5 years’ on their website.

So the next thing I did, after skimming the article, was reach for the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget in ez2view to look at forecasts for ‘Market Demand’ in South Australia:

2025-02-11-at-18-40-ez2view-ForecastConvergence-SA-TotalDemand

Perhaps a bit like a broken record(?) we repeat that this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’.

What’s particularly interesting here is that:

1)  I have manually set the colour range to focus only on levels of demand above 3,000MW

… noting that the all-time maximum was 3,402MW way back on 31st January 2011.

2)  We see that the colours only occur for tomorrow evening:

(a)  With the colours generally becoming more pronounced up the column

(b)  Though there was an adjustment downwards in the forecasts earlier today

(c)  The current forecasts suggest that the ‘Market Demand’ might exceed 3,200MW

3)  If this were to occur, then it would be the highest demand level since back on 16th January 2014.

(a)  which we recorded in this article back at that time.

(b)  so more than 11 years ago.

(c)  noting that I have not looked at other measures that others use, like Operational Demand.


About the Author

Paul McArdle
Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients. Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.

2 Comments on "Wednesday 12th February 2025 could be a big day for ‘Market Demand’ in South Australia"

  1. Looks like a record today over 3700MW!!

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