Renewable energy has broken through another key milestone on Australia’s main grid, meeting more than 80 per cent of demand for the first time on Saturday afternoon, and could have met all of demand and more were it not for heavy curtailment of wind and solar.
According to various data sources, renewable energy as a share of total demand reached 80.5 per cent at 12.25 pm on Saturday afternoon (one data source put it at 81.5 per cent), breaking the previous record of 79.6 per cent that had been set just a day earlier.
The record might have been a lot higher: More than one half of available wind output was being curtailed and nearly half of large scale output was being curtailed, despite near record levels of storage, particularly from the growing fleet of big batteries on the grid.
The curtailment occurred because rooftop solar was meeting more than half of demand, and the grid is not yet ready to meet 100 per cent renewables, which would require all coal and gas fired generation to be switched off. That won’t happen until the market operator is satisfied that grid forming inverters can meet all the system security needs.
And coal fired generators went about as low as they can go without being switched off – which they don’t like doing – and were reduced to a share of just 18.8 per cent of demand. So something had to give.
Geoff Eldridge, from GE Nemlog, described the event as a significant milestone for the National Electricity Market – the formal name for the country’s main grid that covers most of Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.
Eldridge says that at 12:30pm on Saturday, approximately 8.42 GW of large scale wind and solar output, about equal amounts of wind and solar. Curtailment happens because of economic reasons (wind and solar farms choose not to operate when prices are below zero), and because of grid congestion or maintenance.
“By 13:50 AEST, the NEM had already curtailed around 54.8 GWh of renewable energy, while flexible loads absorbed around 22.5 GWh, including about 17.3 GWh into batteries and about 5.2 GWh into pumped hydro,” he noted in a post on LinkedIn.
He also noted that there would have been a significant absorption capacity of behind-the-meter home batteries.
“So during the first interval in which renewables exceeded 80% of NEM consumption, the system was simultaneously:
• supplying more than four-fifths of consumption from renewables and storage
• reducing coal to less than one-fifth of consumption
• absorbing more than 5.3 GW of flexible load
• charging batteries at around 4.5 GW
• and curtailing another 8.4 GW of available renewable output
“That combination is becoming an increasingly important part of the NEM transition story.
“It is no longer simply: more renewables means less coal. Increasingly it is: more renewables share → less thermal generation share + much larger flexible loads + batteries absorbing surplus energy + significant renewable curtailment
“And today, for the first time, that transition took renewable supply beyond 80% of NEM consumption.”
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Giles Parkinson
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor-in-chief of Renew Economy, and founder and editor of its EV-focused sister site The Driven. He is the co-host of the weekly Energy Insiders Podcast. Giles has been a journalist for more than 40 years and is a former deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review. You can find him on LinkedIn and on Twitter.
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