Things get a little bit shaky !
Last night at 5.30pm, the electricity grid hit peak demand for All Ireland at 6,638MW - not far off Record peak demand of 6,878MW reached on December 21st last year.
But total system generation was only 6,106MW leaving a shortfall of 532MW.
Wind energy was low most of the day, only 380MW or about 7% was available for the whole island at 5.30pm.
The two UK interconnectors saved the day with combined imports of 450MW. There was still a shortfall of about 80MW, made up presumably from demand side units. These would comprise mostly of diesel generators and combined heat and power units. These units are "non-centrally monitored" according to Eirgrid and are not included in these graphs.
Of course, that damned Brexit lot across the sea with their dastardly nuclear power charged us handsomely for the imported power, at € 2,000 a MW.
To give some credit to the Irish grid operators, they were correct to build the East West interconnector as it is making up for the once efficient gas plant that have been prematurely wrecked from backing up the wind. One just hopes that the UK will have sufficient power to give us on those cold winter nights over the next few months.
Worth pointing out Owen that the "Shortfall" you outline was actually scheduled Interconnector flows stemming from the Day Ahead Market runs. The amount of power scheduled online on any given day is based on forecasted demand from EirGrid. If in real time there is a difference between demand / generation, EirGrid will counter trade or schedule on additional generation to resolve the imbalance. In your example above, EirGrid contracted 21 MWh at 17:00 on Tuesday at €2k/MWh. This is certainly a high price per MWh but given the volume was only 0.3% of the total generation at that point in time I would say the grid is as shaky as you make it out to be.
ReplyDeleteWorth pointing out too for your readers that the entirety of interconnector flows are not contracted at the imbalance price. They are settled on the price agreed in the Day Ahead Market, which is always much lower than the balacning market.
Regards
Mark
Comment above clearly should have read "isn't as shaky as you make it out to be"
ReplyDeleteMark