How much Semi-Scheduled VRE expected to be available on Thursday evening 18th December 2025?

It’s Thursday morning 18th December 2025, and already we have noted:

• the ‘Forecast tight supply-demand balance this evening upgraded to forecast LOR3 (i.e. load shedding) …’.; and also
• that there are 4 of 12 coal units offline at present, and another is experiencing issues.

 

But readers should remember that it’s rarely a single contributing factor that triggers tight situations like this … so I wonder what’s expected for the Semi-Scheduled fleet of VRE in NSW at the time of the forecast LOR3 conditions.  That’s easy to see with this repurposed window of ‘Forecast Convergence’ widgets in ez2view as at 06:30 (NEM time) this morning:

 

In this case, we’ve flipped the widgets to show the ‘Chart’ view, as I’m not so much interested in change from one forecast run to the next, but rather the underlying pattern:

1)  It’s understandable that the forecast LOR3 conditions are synchronised with the sunset-decline of Large Solar across the NSW region

… so another to watch would be any late afternoon cloud cover (especially if it delivers ‘the Russ Christ effect’).

2)  What was perhaps less certain is the forecast aggregate UIGF for the NSW wind fleet:

(a)  Which we see is forecast to be quite modest this afternoon/evening

(b)  But perhaps more concerning is the forecast decline during that period, aligned with when the forecast LOR2 and forecast LOR3 conditions exists.

… so two more things to watch will be:

i.  the precise timing of the wind drop in intensity;

ii.  hopefully not compounded too much by network congestion.