The national electricity grid operator is warning of possible insufficient power generation to meet households’ demand on Friday.
Transpower has issued a notice saying there was a risk that power generation and reserves would not meet demand between 7.30am-8.30am.
It said if power generators could not provide enough electricity, Transpower would manage demand to avoid a grid emergency.
“The system operator may instruct the grid owner to disconnect feeders without further notice to connected parties,” it said.
I tought temperatures below 0°C are common in NZ 🤔
It’s unlikely that a temp of -4C in Christchurch is the issue. Single digit negatives are normal across much of the country.
It may be that forecasts have cold temps across much of the country, so instead of it peaking in one area it might be everywhere. Or it might be the location of the generation that can’t get to where it’s forecast to be needed.
The article doesn’t help explain it. Hydro lakes aren’t particularly low. Is peak generation expected to be the highest ever? It’s not mentioned.
This is the kind of situation that variable supply rates for residential households would help. There are many people across the country running solar with batteries, imagine a system where you connect it to a server to get a spot price and have it supply electricity back to the grid at times of high spot prices (that would of course mean providers would have to do variable rates). This one hour period of a slight shortfall could probably easily be supplied by the battery capacity installed in residential homes.
I believe a portion of it is quite a low forecast for wind generation coinciding pretty closely with the morning peak.
The peak-trough consumption difference seems to be about 2GW, and wind generation averages about 400MW but can hit 900MW
If you wanna poke around with some historical data yourself, I scrape a lot of it for my own curiosity, and have opened up my dashboard
Thank you for the information, yes it is a bit confusing for me, because the article doesn’t explain about low water levels.
Yeah, the article doesn’t say much at all. Water levels seem ok, so hard to know what the issue might be.
I mean Taupo lake looks a bit low?
Says in the article that some generators are down for required maintenance “ahead of the winter”. Doesn’t specify which type of generation or whether the maintenance needs to be carried out specifically to prepare for winter conditions though.
It would be nice to have a bit more detail, maybe justification for why maintenance of electrical plant can’t be done at times of the year when demand is lower.
Common enough; but I wonder if this is a symptom of new generation not keeping up with attempts to reduce emissions. Less coal/gas power generation & less wood-fired heating combining with a cold snap.
But the intent of a grid notice like that is to encourage generators to turn on more supply I think - its only a grid emergency notice that indicates supply isn’t meeting demand.
The other thing that’ll happen is where areas have ripple control they’ll turn off hot water & street lights & whatnot to reduce demand as well.
Yeah, I guess coal/gas power.still needed during the colder months.