Paul McArdle recently drew my attention to a short Twitter thread started by David Osmond on the arcane topic of NEM system frequency behaviour: At Paul’s invitation I’ve dived further into this issue to fill in some background, provide additional data, and comment on...
Guest author, Allan O'Neil, takes a look at the AEMO's 2020 ESOO to unpick the reason for the differences in outlook (and the sensationalised news headlines) compared to 2019 ESOO.
Guest author, Allan O'Neil, invests some time to explore a number of different aspects of Easter Saturday (11th April 2020), each noteworthy in their own right (including low demand, high percentage share renewables, negative prices and dynamic bidding)
Guest author, Allan O'Neil tries to piece together further detail of what is intended with the apparent tightening of the Reliability Standard (which has sat at 0.002% USE for many years).
Another islanding event separated the SA region from the rest of the NEM yesterday (Monday, 2nd of March). Allan O'Neil investigates what happened before the event and possible causes.
Guest author, Allan O'Neil, takes a look at what's happened in the (islanded) market for FCAS services in South Australia over the past two weeks with Heywood out of service. He notes: "generators in SA as a group would have paid out roughly twice in...
Guest author, Allan O'Neil delves further into understanding what happened in response to the transmission tower failures on 31st January 2020 that sent system frequency in South Australia and led to a large reversal of flows.
Guest author, Allan O'Neil does a masterful job with limited time in reviewing some of the goings-on in the NEM (particularly VIC and SA) on Thursday 30th January 2020
Guest author, Allan O'Neil, takes a look, via the GSD2019 (released today), at the four different headwinds facing solar farm developers and operators operating in the NEM.
Perhaps missed amongst all the bushfire-related action in the NEM, the SA Minister for Energy last week initiated the Retailer Reliability Obligation. Guest author Allan O’Neil tries to come to grips with what this means, and what happens next?
We take a look at challenges for AEMO in operating the system under the security threats posed by the ongoing bushfires …
Considering the extraordinary weather, bushfires, and a couple of large Victorian generators still not back from long term repairs, last week was probably less eventful for the NEM than might have been expected, but it certainly wasn’t incident-free. A very industrious Paul McArdle somehow found...
Guest author, Allan O'Neil, provides us an update today on what we can see about summer 2019-20 (in the physical market, and the financial market), now that it is only just around the corner.
Guest author Allan O'Neil provides this handy explainer on how generators’ contract positions affect their bidding decisions and can make negative spot prices pay off, at least in the short term. Very useful for those readers not actively involved in wholesale trading in helping to...
Rapidly growing solar PV output has been widely tagged as the cause of low and even negative prices in Queensland. But in any market it’s the behaviour of ALL participants that determines price outcomes. Guest author Allan O’Neil takes a closer look at recent NEM...
Without resiling from last week’s criticism of how the headlines from AEMO’s 2019 Electricity Statement of Opportunities (ESOO) were communicated, it’d be churlish for me to fault the depth of disclosure and data sitting behind those results. Literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of...
I’d rather not add to the number of conspiracy theories in circulation, but I wonder if there’s a conspiracy to make understanding our electricity system in general, and its reliability in particular, as difficult as humanly possible. There’s no doubt it’s a sophisticated piece of...
Two large thermal generating units in Victoria with combined capacity of over 800 MW have recently experienced major electrical faults each requiring many months to repair. Previous WattClarity posts have covered initial assessments of the outages of AGL’s 530 MW Loy Yang A unit 2 (followed...
A broader look at what the extended outage at Loy Yang A unit 2 seems to be having on the spot and financial markets into the future, via AEMO MT PASA data, and via the ASX Energy's futures price data.
Guest author, Allan O'Neil, contributes to our series of articles explaining how prices are set the the NEM (as part of how dispatch works). In this article, Allan explains some of the details in the AEMO's "Price Setter" file.