Hornsdale Wind Farm starts up at time in South Australia when every MWh matters

Watt Clarity

With plenty of media (and particularly social media) coverage of initial generation at the Hornsdale Wind Farm in South Australia over the past week or so, I grabbed a short break in my schedule to power up NEM-Review and produce this quick trend in the output of Hornsdale compared with the aggregate output of all wind farms across South Australia:

As we can see (when included on the same scale) it’s clearly early days for the Hornsdale plant, with output so far barely peaking above 10MW for particular half-hours.

When fully commissioned over several stages, peak output will be orders of magnitude higher than current output.  From memory 2 stages are confirmed proceeding already – but I think there might also be plans for more?  Perhaps one of our readers can provide further information in a comment below?

Back to current NEM machinations, however – in the chart above we can see how generation (from any source available) cannot come a moment too soon, however, for a region facing a very volatile period currently as a result of multiple factors – including planned transmission outages severely limiting imports from VIC, low wind, and (coincident, and related) high gas prices.

Coincident (but increasingly related) variables that are an illustration of the challenges we’ll face as the broader energy transition I spoke about here continues.

Source: Watt Clarity. Reproduced with permission.