Only 52 days after I initially envisaged being able to have this article published, a couple things today have prompted me to post this drain-dump of concerns that have been jangling around in my head – related to possible risks that COVID might pose in the NEM.
Read MoreIn a sneak preview of part of next Thursday’s Clean Energy Council webinar, Marcelle compares the spot revenue performance of wind farms across the NEM.
Guest author, Mark Todoroff, examines operational demand figures for each region to quantify the impact of COVID-19 on the NEM.
In this 5th article in a series, we look at the impact on electricity consumption of Stage 4 Lockdown associated ‘State of Disaster’ in Victoria
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.
Jill Cainey from Energy Networks Australia maps the impact of COVID-19 on residential and business energy consumption in Victoria.
My participation in yesterday’s session about ‘Energy Technology – performing under (heat) stress’, organised by the Australian Institute of Energy, was an opportunity to reflect on what I saw as the Four Headline Events that gave example to a great many challenges we will have to grapple with as this energy (and climate) transition gathers pace.
For several reasons I’ve updated my view of how daily aggregate Underlying Electricity Consumption has been trending across the NEM in this ‘Year of COVID’.
… because the evidence currently suggests that this is just not the case (in this article I explore and explain further)
Our guest author Stephen Sproul looks at how the Dalrymple Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), currently the only source of virtual inertia on the NEM, responded to the November 2019 SA islanding event.
This started as a consideration of how applicable ‘change of electricity demand’ is as a general metric for communicating the impact of coronavirus (and measures taken to address it). However it is morphed into some considerations much broader than the energy sector…
Like everyone else, we’re grappling with how COVID-19 will impact on us personally – and also in terms of what we do at work. Here’s a few initial thoughts about the types of impacts (and risks to manage) in relation to the National Electricity Market.
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”
Investing some time over the weekend with a some higher-speed data on output of rooftop solar PV systems across VIC and SA reveals some interesting observations about what happened on Friday 31st January 2020 in conjunction with the transmission damage and Heywood trip.
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.
Cautioning readers that I am a novice at reading frequency data in this manner, I take a first look at how the frequency in Melbourne and South Australia varied at the time of the transmission outage at 13:24:30 on Friday 31st January 2020.
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….