Solar reaches new peak of 126.7 pct of South Australia demand, NSW coal at record low

The combination of rooftop solar and large scale solar set yet another new record over the weekend, accounting for 126.7 per cent of South Australia state demand at its peak at 12.55pm (AEST) on Sunday.

The new benchmark, sourced from data analysts GPE NEMLog2, comes just a week after rooftop solar alone accounted for more than 101 per cent of state demand.

On Sunday, rooftop solar reached a peak of around 95 per cent, with utility scale solar providing the rest. It reached a peak of 31.6 per cent, a record for the state. Excess power is either exported to Victoria or stored in the state’s growing portfolio of household batteries.

That high share for large scale solar is unusual because it is often turned off in the face of negative prices. The combination of large scale and rooftop solar first exceeded 100 per cent of state demand in 2020, but has not grown so rapidly in recent years because of the growing number of negative pricing intervals.

It wasn’t the only record to tumble in the last couple of days, with rooftop solar PV continuing to make a mess of the NSW coal generators’ business plans as it set new output records and pushed coal output to new lows.

On Monday – again according to GPE NEMLog2 – rooftop PV in NSW set a new output record of 4223 MW, up from 4175 MW five days earlier, and achieved its highest share of demand, 47.4 per cent, up from 46 per cent in late September.

Output from the state’s coal generators, meanwhile, fell to a record low of 1,913 MW on Sunday morning. For a bit of context, the state has four coal generators with a combined capacity of 8,240 MW, so less than one quarter of its capacity found space on the grid.

Around the same time, rooftop PV also sent the state’s operational demand below 4GW in NSW for the first time (to 3991 MW), and Tasmania recorded more than 200 MW of rooftop PV output for the first time.