Another conversation this week led to a discussion about New England Solar Farm unit 2, and some pretty strong curtailment through daylight hours over the prior weekend – Saturday 22nd February and Sunday 23rd February 2025.
This is seen through the ‘Unit Dashboard’ widget in ez2view here as at 08:25 (NEM time) on Tuesday 25th February 2025:
There’s a couple other notes on the image, but we’ll particularly highlight here the very strong curtailment through daylight hours:
1) On Saturday 22nd February 2025:
(a) Unit output was ramped fully down to 0MW at 09:25 (NEM time) … i.e. first time target = 0MW
(b) And remained at 0MW until 13:10 (NEM time) … i.e. first time target > 0MW since that time
2) On Sunday 23rd February 2025:
(a) Unit output was ramped fully down to 0MW at until 08:30 (NEM time) …i.e. first time target = 0MW
(b) And remained at 0MW until 14:20 (NEM time) … i.e. first time target > 0MW since that time
By way of comparison, here’s the older sibling, NEWENSF1 – which was not curtailed nearly as severely over the weekend:
Time permitting, we might delve into those two days above for NEWENSF2 in a subsequent article.
What about unit output (and curtailment) through 2024?
Given the recent release of the GSD2024, I thought it might be relevant to show some snippets from the ‘A’ Page and ‘B’ Page together for both units:
New England Solar Farm 2
We can see in the following image that the capacity factor was quite low through October 2024:
… and there are a number of constraint equations listed that are
New England Solar Farm 1
Here’s the older sibling again, with a similar drop in output through October 2024:
… with similar constraint equations listed as ‘top 5’ for the entire calendar 2024 year (and with them prevalent in October 2024).
Leave a comment