Daily wind generation does not seem to be close to 90% of South Australia’s supplies–are we missing something?

Alerted  by a tweet from someone at Pacific Hydro today that wind supplies had exceeded 90% of South Australia’s electricity supply on 2 days last week, we were curious to have a look further.

2013-07-15-tweet-PacificHydro

Powering up NEM-Review, we were able to quickly generate the following trend, as we were curious to see what was meant by the tweet:

Trended output from wind farms, and other sources, in South Aystralia over the past week.

We can clearly see that, over the 2 week period selected to yesterday, there were some days when the wind farm output was significantly higher than others, and that it did represent a significant proportion of SA’s supplies and demand – but on no day does the output seem to be approaching 90% of either:
(a)  total energy supplied by all generators for the day (the grey bars); or
(b)  total metered demand consumed by energy users across South Australia.

We presume that Pacific Hydro might have been referring to some smaller time period within two of the days above (maybe for discrete 5-minute dispatch intervals, or 30-minute trading periods), and that the wording in the tweet is just ambiguous.

If someone could help us out (by adding a comment below, or contacting offline – tel 07 3368 4064) we’d be interested to have a look further later in the week?


About the Author

Paul McArdle
One of three founders of Global-Roam back in 2000, Paul has been CEO of the company since that time. As an author on WattClarity, Paul's focus has been to help make the electricity market more understandable.

2 Comments on "Daily wind generation does not seem to be close to 90% of South Australia’s supplies–are we missing something?"

  1. Hi Paul,

    Pacific Hydro may have been referring to an analysis that was done earlier that I am responsible for, that utilised an erroneous demand figure (ie, non-scheduled generation had been subtracted from the denominator and thus, the demand figure was lower than it should have been in the formulas).

    I’m working with the publisher to get it corrected, and I’ll let you know once it’s all fixed up. Apologies to you and Pacific Hydro for the error!

    Cheers,
    Ketan

  2. Ketan,

    How on earth did you let that get through your own sense checker?

    ** Additional comments removed by the Editor as it seemed ad hominem **

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