Wind energy hits record peak of 146 per cent of state demand in South Australia

Wind energy hit a record peak of 146 per cent of state demand in South Australia in the early hours of Wednesday morning, as renewables overall also edged to a new record share – 62.94 per cent – of the overall grid.

The new peak of 146 per cent was noted by data analysts GPE NemLog2 and occurred at 4.25am on Wednesday, beating the previous record renewable share in the state of 142 per cent that was set at 9.20am on December 21 last year, when there was a mixture of wind and solar.

The excess power is exported to Victoria with some also stored in some of the state’s big batteries. But it also underlines the need for more links to other stages – such as the one now being built to NSW – and the potential of more storage, or more demand loads such as green hydrogen.

Wind and solar output have averaged 64 per cent of state demand over the last 12 months, the most in the world and remarkable in such an isolated grid with few connections.

The new record is yet to be confirmed by AEMO, but the market operator usually bases its records on 30 minute data so the result may not be the same.

Even so, it is still another significant milestone for South Australia, representing not just the addition of new wind capacity – in this case via the wind component of the Port Augusta Renewable Energy Hub that will be the biggest wind and solar hybrid in the country – and also new rules that allow more wind to be injected into the grid at any one time.

Those rules were made possible by the installation of four synchronous condensers last year which means that fewer gas generators are needed to provide system strength, in turn preventing the need to curtail large amounts of wind in most conditions.