For a second portion of Q2 “elephant eating”, I’ll look in some detail at the dynamics of an early instance of spot price volatility in Queensland, because many drivers turn out to be similar across other volatile intervals in the…
AEMO issued a Market Notice this morning for an LOR2 “Low Reserve Condition” in South Australia. Here’s my sense of some of what’s happening.
On the 23rd of July, 2008 one of the HWTS – LYPS 500kV Line was down for maintenance when a second one tripped, leaving only one line remaining. This caused NEMMCO to declare the failure of that remaining line the greatest single contingency in the NEM, causing them to buy large amounts of FCAS from generators.
It appears that we spoke too soon when we mentioned on the 22nd July that winter 2008 had been relatively uneventful.
Just over 24 hours from making these comments, we saw prices jump sky-high in the mainland regions, and go the other way (to the negative price cap) in Tasmania.