Sunday 16th March could be a stinker in NSW … including with sporadic forecasts of LOR2

Earlier today I saw that Felix Levesque has written ‘NSW faces low energy reserves amid scorching heat’ on DTN (formerly Weatherzone) with respect to Sunday 16th March 2025.

That forecast for hot weather to explain the re-appearance of ‘forecast LORx’  Market Notices at the AEMO we’d seen in the past couple days – with the most recent being MN125624 at 11:08 NEM time today as follows:

‘——————————————————————-
MARKET NOTICE
——————————————————————-

From :              AEMO
To   :              NEMITWEB1
Creation Date :     14/03/2025     11:08:46

——————————————————————-

Notice ID               :         125624
Notice Type ID          :         RESERVE NOTICE
Notice Type Description :         LRC/LOR1/LOR2/LOR3
Issue Date              :         14/03/2025
External Reference      :         STPASA – Update of the Forecast Lack Of Reserve Level 2 (LOR2) in the NSW Region on 16/03/2025

——————————————————————-

Reason :

AEMO ELECTRICITY MARKET NOTICE

The Forecast LOR2 condition in the NSW region advised in AEMO Electricity Market Notice No. 125622 has been updated at 1000 hrs 14/03/2025 to the following:

From 1730 hrs to 1830 hrs 16/03/2025.
The forecast capacity reserve requirement is 1019 MW.
The minimum capacity reserve available is 845 MW.

AEMO is seeking a market response.

AEMO has not yet estimated the latest time it would need to intervene through an AEMO intervention event.

AEMO Operations

——————————————————————-
END OF REPORT
——————————————————————-’

… though note that this alert was subsequently cancelled at 13:02 with MN125625.

I don’t have much time to look this afternoon, but here’s a grab of an ez2view window comprising three different copies of the ‘Forecast Convergence’ widget looking out into the ST PASA time horizon (i.e. so we can look as far as Sunday):

Remember that this widget allows one to ‘look up a vertical’ in order to ‘see that other dimension of time’

I’ve highlighted the time-slice that corresponds to Sunday afternoon/evening and we see:

1)  Forecasts for ‘Market Demand’ in NSW have been moving around a little – but with the possibility of demand as high as 12,300MW

2)  One of the big determinants on actual outcomes will be what capacity is actually available at the time.  In the middle panel we see successive forecasts of Available Generation:

(a)  Which obviously drops into the evening as Large Solar backs off;

(b)  But we also see a drop in the availability ‘up the vertical’ due to some changed outage plans of (one or more) firming units.

Flipping to look at AEMO’s UIGF for Wind and Solar, we see the following:

This shows:

1)  Forecast Wind Capability on Sunday is good, with the forecast strengthening the past ~24 hours

2)  But some uncertainty in forecasts for Solar:

(a)  remember the caveats about the challenges more than a couple hours out in ‘Is VRE Forecastable?’.

(b)  indeed, with this chosen colouring we can see a clear difference between (earlier) ST PASA and (closer to dispatch) P30 forecasts.

So we’ll have to wait and see…