New South Wales joined Australia’s renewables record breaking spree over the weekend, with a combination of mostly solar and wind energy delivering more than half of the state’s electricity needs for the first time.
As the chart from Open NEM illustrates below, at around 1pm on Sunday October 4, a total of 50.2% of New South Wales electricity mix was supplied by renewable energy, including 28.4% from rooftop solar, 13.3% large-scale solar, 8.2% wind, and 0.3% hydro.
It’s the latest record for renewable energy notched up over the past week, including a new high of 52.9% reached for the NEM on Friday, and then wind and solar together providing more than half of NEM demand for more than three hours on Saturday.
And in South Australia, wind and solar combined to meet an impressive 73.3 per cent of local demand for the month of September.
As with the other occasions, the New South Wales record high renewables contribution was accompanied by fossil fuel lows – most strikingly in this case, a 0.002% contribution from gas.
Indeed, as Simon Holmes à Court noted on Thursday gas has been “the biggest loser” in the share of total NEM generation, “falling a whopping 18.7% to less than 5 per cent” over the course of September, and to just 8.6 per cent over the past 12 months.
