Transpower warns of possible power shortages on Friday
Transpower warns of possible power shortages on Friday
Transpower has issued a notice saying there was a risk power generation would not meet demand in the morning.
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.
MetService has forecast temperatures to plunge overnight, with Christchurch set to fall to -4 degrees Celsius
I tought temperatures below 0°C are common in NZ 🤔
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.
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.
Yeah, I guess coal/gas power.still needed during the colder months.
"We will work with lines companies to, as a last resort, switch off power to locations for a short period of time."
Asked if she could guarantee this wouldn't happen during the colder months, Bramley said no.
"No power system can absolutely guarantee supply but as we've seen today, when industry comes together we can make sure there is enough in the system."
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
Looks like the article has been fleshed out a lot more. They have a lot of the plants offline ahead of winter for maintenance to prepare for winter, but looks like they got caught out by unseasonably cold weather.
This is what happens when you don’t have straight power.
Be sure to sleep in tomorrow if you can!