Mini-crisis on NSW’s power grid amid tropical heat; US approves sale of Tomahawk missiles to Australia. Follow updates here.
The Australian Energy Market Operator had to urgently secure emergency reserve generation late Thursday afternoon for NSW amid a burst of tropical heat, raising fresh worries about capacity of the system to cope with the shutdown of AGL Energy’s large Liddell coal power station next month.
The squeeze on the power grid drove wholesale prices in both NSW and Queensland at times up to the $15,500 a megawatt-hour maximum in the early evening, several hundred times higher than in some other states, as electricity use for cooling surged and amid apparently low wind generation and fading solar.
Both states were classified by AEMO as reaching the second of three degrees of severity in terms of the scarcity of available capacity to ensure supply remained secure.it had secured last-minute supplies under its Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader system to boost reserve supply and minimise the risk of blackouts, but did not say it had actually called on the extra reserves.
The mini-crisis comes just weeks away from the shutdown in April of the remaining three units at the 1600 megawatt Liddell generator in the Hunter Valley. One unit at the ageing plant, which is 50 years old and has become increasingly unreliable, was already closed last April.
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