{"id":178839,"date":"2025-09-30T01:03:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T01:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/178839\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T01:03:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T01:03:12","slug":"a-quick-review-of-qld-solar-and-curtailment-on-monday-29th-september-2025-with-price-at-mpf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/178839\/","title":{"rendered":"A quick review of QLD solar (and curtailment) on Monday 29th September 2025 with price at MPF"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should be focused elsewhere (such as using what \u2018spare\u2019 time I have to prepare my thoughts for next week\u2019s NEMdev conference<\/a>) but allowed myself to be distracted* when I noticed this update from Ian Connor on LinkedIn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* note \u2026 not entirely a distraction, as will be topical for discussions next week<\/p>\n

\"2025-09-29-at-10-10-LinkedIn-IanConnor\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ian was writing about the 10:05 and 10:10 dispatch interval (NEM time<\/a>) on Monday 29th September 2025<\/a> \u2026 so I would it would be of interest to quickly Time-Travel ez2view<\/a> back to the 10:10 dispatch interval in order to see what the situation was:<\/p>\n

\"2025-09-29-at-10-10-ez2view-QLDsolar\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In this first snapshot, we can see:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0 the two spot prices down at \u2013$1,000\/MWh,<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0 and we can also see that a number of solar farms are still running despite 2 x dispatch intervals down at the Market Price Floor<\/a>:<\/p>\n

(a)\u00a0 In the \u2018NEM Map\u2019 widget we see that:<\/p>\n

i.\u00a0 the aggregate FinalMW for all Large Solar plant that the AEMO \u2018sees\u2019 in real time was at 1,312MW<\/p>\n

\u2026 noting that this actually dropped from a higher point of 1,567MW five minutes beforehand<\/p>\n

ii.\u00a0 remembering that Medium Solar and Small Solar are actually invisible<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026 though people do increasingly treat AEMO\u2019s estimates as almost the same as the real thing!<\/p>\n

(b)\u00a0 In the \u2018QLD Schematic\u2019 widget we can see the FinalMW for all visible power stations across QLD:<\/p>\n

i.\u00a0 I\u2019ve highlighted some of the biggest contributors to that 1,312MW aggregate solar<\/p>\n

ii.\u00a0 There are a several groups of these:<\/p>\n

>\u00a0 Some (like Clermont, Emerald, Columboola and others) have been running consistently over the 2-hour history in the spark line;<\/p>\n

>\u00a0 Others (like Aldoga, Collinsville, Daydream, Hamilton, Hayman) have just recently increased their output \u2026 which is interesting, given the price dropped.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This prompts a use of the \u2018Trends Engine\u2019 in ez2view<\/a> to show this near-term trend of aggregate data (noting we don\u2019t have \u2018next day public\u2019 data yet for the current Market Day):<\/p>\n

\"2025-09-29-at-12-21-ez2view-Trend-QLDsolar\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With this chart we can see:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0 Some sizeable curtailment<\/a> across the main sunlit hours of Friday 26th September 2025<\/a>, Saturday 27th September 2025<\/a>, Sunday 28th September 2025<\/a> and thus far today (Monday 29th September 2025<\/a>).<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0 What looks to be a sizeable dispatch error<\/a> on Sunday 28th September 2025<\/a> ;<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0 And the drop in price to the \u2013$1,000\/MWh for 10:05 and 10:10 \u2026 that is coincident with (and probably caused by) an increase in output of 487MW to 10:05 (from 1,080MW to 1,567MW at 10:05)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

With this final image, we include a \u2018Constraint Dashboard\u2019 widget<\/a> focused on the \u2018#R033913_002_RAMP_F\u2019 constraint equation<\/a> at the 10:00 dispatch interval:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0 i.e. before the price dropped<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0 This Constraint Equation:<\/p>\n

(a)\u00a0 is a Hard Ramping constraint leading into the \u2018Q>>LCCP_CLWU_BCCP\u2019 constraint equation<\/p>\n

(b)\u00a0 with respect to the outage on the Larcom Creek to Calliope River (8859) 275kV line<\/p>\n

\"2025-09-29-at-10-00-ez2view-ConstraintDashboard-R033913_002_RAMP_F\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In this image we\u2019ve highlighted a range of units (many solar farms) with large LHS factors that show Local Price<\/a> below \u2013$1,000\/MWh as an indication of being \u2018constrained down\u2019 by this hard ramping constraints.<\/p>\n

Not shown here, but this constraint equation un-bound for the 10:05 dispatch interval, which enabled these units to increase in output (subject to bids), which thus would have been a significant contributing driving the price to the Market Price Floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I should be focused elsewhere (such as using what \u2018spare\u2019 time I have to prepare my thoughts for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,128],"class_list":["post-178839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}