Wind blows down more output and generation records on Australia’s main grid

Windy conditions across Australia’s southern regions created two new instantaneous output records and a new daily generation record over the weekend for wind energy across the country’s main grid.

The first output record was broken late Saturday night, when it reached 7,353 MW at 10pm, but that record was broken again on Sunday night when the output reached a peak of 7,417 MW at 1145pm, according to data from GPE NemLog2.

It is the third time in a month that the wind output record has been broken, reflecting the additional capacity added across the grid in the last 12 months. And it won’t be the last, as the country enters the windy season when such records are normally broken.

At the time of the latest record, wind accounted for 31 per cent of total output. The record wind share is 37 per cent.

It wasn’t the only output record to fall over the weekend, with the combined total of wind and large scale solar farms also setting new peaks, on both Saturday and Sunday.

The new peak of 10,716 MW of large scale wind and solar was set at 3.05pm on Sunday, easily beating the previous record of 10,228 MW set at 8.15am the previous day, according to NemLog.

That record had easily smashed the previous peak of 9,423 set at 3pm on February 23 this year. At the time of the latest peak, large scale wind and solar accounted for around 42 per cent of total generation, with rooftop solar adding another 15 per cent.

Earlier in the day, the combined output of all renewables reached more than 65.5 per cent, close to its record share.

Update: Wind energy engineer David Osmond noted also that daily wind energy generation records were also blown away over the weekend.

“After Saturday’s total of 148.6 GWh just missed the old record by 0.9 GWh, Sunday’s total of 158.7 GWh well and truly set the bar higher,” he noted on Twitter.