Records continue to tumble in the off-season, with the rise of rooftop PV. Both South Australia and Whole-of-NEM hit new low points Sun 11th October 2020.
Hot on the heels of a new record low point for Scheduled Demand (a week ago) in VIC, today sees Scheduled Demand in SA plunge to 315MW in the 11:50 dispatch interval on Sunday 13th September 2020.
Out of curiosity, and driven by questions received from several people, I’ve invested a bit of time today to delve further into the record low level of Scheduled Demand seen in the Victorian region (and perhaps also across the whole of the NEM) on Saturday 29th August 2020.
AEMO also published something else today which (whilst not as publicised as the ESOO) will be of keen interest to many stakeholders in South Australia…
This 8th case study in this series presents tabular results for all Semi-Scheduled DUIDs which were operational at the time of the SA System Black event.
After publishing three Case Studies on Saturday, this 4th Case Study in a long series is much more complex – with 8 different Semi-Scheduled Wind Farm units across VIC and SA exhibiting significant deviations from Target. This Case study looks at April 2016, which is also 3 years after the first 3 case studies.
Spurred by a number of concurrent requests I’ve returned to the pattern of prior analysis of Q2 prices (completed in 2016, 2017 and 2018) to look at what’s changed for Q2 2020 that’s just ended. Some stakeholders clearly taken by surprise. Analysis includes the SWIS in Western Australia
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)
Alarms in one of our NEMwatch dashboards alerted me to the plunging level of Scheduled Demand seen this afternoon in the the Victorian and South Australian regions of the NEM – a new record low point for South Australia.
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.
As time has permitted, I’ve invested some time to prepare this first stage of a review of what went on during the period from 31st Jan 2020 to 17th Feb 2020 – a period during which the South Australian region formed its own frequency island following the transmission line damage. A period we’ve called an ‘accelerated accidental experiment’.
Two weeks ago (Monday 17th February) a ‘temporary fix’ was put in place to reconnect SA with VIC following the transmission line outage that began on 31st January 2020. Well, we’ve islanded again today….
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 contingency raise FCAS costs what they earned from selling energy”
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.
In order to help us (internally) map out all the different threads to explore in terms of what happened on Friday 31st January 2020 on a remarkable day in the NEM, I’ve identified a few of the key threads here over the weekend. More articles to follow as time permits….
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
A brief overview of a stressful afternoon/evening in the NEM, where a confluence of events (heatwave-driven high demand, low wind, coal unit trip, etc…) drive LOR2 low reserve condition notice in both VIC and SA, and gear AEMO up to call on Reserve Trader (yet again!)
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?
Took 2-3 times longer than planned (as there were a few different interesting observations that came out) but here is our initial – and perhaps only! – review of what happened in South Australia on Thursday 19th December 2019 (i.e. yesterday).
Four weeks ago, we observed a significant discrepancy between AEMO’s forecast for (what would have been) a record low point for Scheduled Demand in South Australia and what actually eventuated. We’ve now had time to explore further…