‘Lowest ever*’ point for ‘Market Demand’ in NSW crashes lower, on Sunday 16th February 2025

I was not expecting to see this so soon into the new year (i.e. still being summer 2024-25) or as deep….

The SMS alerts began at the 10:50 dispatch interval (NEM time) this morning, with this NEMwatch snapshot at 10:50 recording how the ‘Market Demand’ in NSW began to nudge lower:

We can see in this snapshot that, whilst QLD is still experiencing typical summer temperatures, south of the border across the rest of the NEM the temperatures definitely don’t seem typical of summer.  As a result I’m presuming that air-conditioning load is not cranked as much as you’d normally expect it to be.

In the couple hours since that time (till publication at 13:00 NEM time) the demand levels continued to drop, with the lowest point* being 2,532MW at 12:00 dispatch interval NEM time:

>> * at least, to this point in time.

We can see that this point was 484MW lower than the prior lowest ever** point from 26th October 2024  (or a drop of 16%)!

>> ** yes, for the pedantic, there was not electricity use before modern society, etc…

Grabbing this satellite/radar image from the BOM at 12:58 NEM time, we can see just how cloudless NSW is at present:

The lack of clouds would be contribute to a bonza yield of rooftop PV … which would be eating further into an (otherwise low because of low airconditioning) Sunday ‘Underlying Demand’ .

 

Also quite low for NEM-wide ‘Market Demand’

Also worth noting that today the NEM-wide ‘Market Demand’ has dropped as low as 11,142MW at the 12:20 NEM time.  But that’s more than 1,000MW above the all-time minimum (from 26th October 2024).