Late afternoon volatility in NSW (and QLD!) on Tuesday 13th May 2025

A short (and perhaps somewhat cryptic – at least for some readers) starting with this snapshot of NEMwatch at 16:35 (NEM time) on Tuesday 13th May 2025 with spot price for energy elevated in NSW:

Note three things highlighted:

1)  Price is up in NSW;

2)  VIC1-NSW1 interconnector is constrained such that it must flow heavily south during this dispatch interval

… another instance of ‘counter-priced flow’ that Dan wrote about in his article ‘Interconnector intricacies: double and triple auto-clamping of pesky negative residues’.

3)  Slightly earlier, there was a large increase in generation from NSW sources (measured via ‘Initial MW’) that was also picked up earlier in this ‘Notification’ widget alert in ez2view:

So for the 16:35 dispatch interval, here’s a collage of ez2view widgets:

From this widget, we can also see three things:

4)  Contingency Lower FCAS prices have spiked in Queensland

… at least in part due to the ‘N-ARDM_8C’ Constraint Set that’s representing an outage on the Armidale to Dumaresq  (8C) line

5)  We can see that the Local Price Adjustment for many units in southern and western NSW has been driven down to a very low level (i.e. some of these units probably ‘constrained down’) …

6)  Which is due to the ‘N-CTYS_3L_WG_CLOSE’ constraint set (which we have seen before), containing the ‘N::N_CTYS_2’ constraint equation that’s bound and affecting not just generation in southern NSW, but also flows on the VNI interconnector.

… and that’s where we will leave it, for now…