Oliver Nunn (from Endgame Analytics) illustrates how wind droughts are ‘a thing’

As noted here in this article, one of the sessions I appreciated the opportunity to attend at the 2025 QCES was one focused on Long Duration Energy Storage…

Amongst the other panel members:

1)  and perhaps not ruffling as many feathers as he did the day beforehand by sharing his perceptions about the ISP Step Change scenario, Oliver Nunn returned in this session.

2)  Oliver invested time to discuss wind droughts as a reason for considering investments in long duration energy storage (not forgetting his comments the day before, and in this session, about the ongoing need for gas-fired generation as well).

Worst contiguous periods for aggregate production from Wind Farms across the modelled period

My recollection of how Oliver explained these results here were that they were modelled aggregate outputs with historical wind speed patterns, assuming that a large deployment of wind farms had already been made across Queensland in these reference years*:

 * so, in a way, not too dissimilar to the approach we took in the ‘Exploring Wind Diversity’ focus of Appendix 27 in GenInsights21 some years ago.

Readers here can note:

1)  Some very low aggregate capacity factors shown over some sustained periods of time

2)  With (my recollection being that) Oliver using a challenge to the effect of ‘imagine what the effect would be if 90% of the coal fleet disappeared for such a sustained period of time’ to illustrate the challenges that this would present.

A week in focus

A bit like what Rimu did with the modelling results at CleanCo, Oliver then showed us modelled results for a particular week in his model as follows:

Again, highlighting a strong need for both gas-fired generation, and long-duration energy storage.