Transpower warns of possible power shortages on Friday (www.rnz.co.nz)

submitted 6 months ago by Dave@lemmy.nz to c/newzealand@lemmy.nz

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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.

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[-] throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 4 points 6 months ago

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 🤔

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] haydng@lemmy.nz 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 6 months ago

The original article has been fleshed out and they now say it's because a lot of generation is offline for maintenance ahead of winter, and this cold weather is earlier than expected.

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

Oh wow heaps of cool stuff there! What happened to hydro in 2021/2022? Capacity doubled overnight, is this just a measuring issue? graph of electricity sources in NZ by type for last 5 years showing hydro jumping in capacity on 1 Jan 2022