By Anton Lang ~
This Post details the daily wind power generation data for the AEMO coverage area in Australia. For the background information, refer to the Introductory Post at this link.
Each image is shown here at a smaller size to fit on the page alongside the data for that day. If you click on each image, it will open on a new page and at a larger size so you can better see the detail.
Note also that on some days, there will be a scale change for the main wind power image, and that even though images may look similar in shape for the power generation black line on the graph when compared to other days, that scale (the total power shown on the left hand vertical axis) has been changed to show the graph at a larger size to better fit the image for that graph.
Tuesday 21 June 2022
Total Wind Power Generation
This image shows the total power generated across the whole day by every wind plant in this vast AEMO coverage area for Australia.
The total Nameplate for all these wind plants changes as each new wind plant comes on line delivering power to the grid. That current Nameplate is 9854MW, and this is from the current total of 76 wind plants.
Note that the shape of this wind power load curve does not follow the shape of the main load curve for total power generation, and that is seen in the image below, the solid black line across the top of the image for that graph. Wind power generates its power only when the wind is blowing, hence it does not follow the actual power generation Load Curve, which is also the the exact same shaped curve as for actual power consumption.
For this data, I have added the times for the daily minimum, and the daily maximum, to show how they do not correlate with the actual times of minimum power consumption (around 4AM each day) and maximum power consumption, the evening Peak. (at around 6.40PM in Winter and earlier during the Summer Months.)
Daily Minimum – 1962MW (10.20AM)
Daily Maximum – 3627MW (11.15PM)
Average Wind Generation – 2648MW
Total Generated Power – 63.55GWH
Percentage Supplied By Wind Power At The Low Point For The Day – 6.9%
Percentage Supplied By Wind Power At Peak Power For The Day – 2030MW of 30020MW – 6.05PM – 6.76% (Mid afternoon Peak with maximum rooftop solar added was 27425MW at 12.00PM)
Average Percentage Of Overall Total Power Generation – %
Daily Operational Capacity Factor – 26.87%
Wind Power Generation Versus Total Power Generation
This image shows the total power generated from all the wind plants in this AEMO coverage area, and compares it to the overall total generated power from every source of power generation, which is the black line at the top of the graph. Wind power is the green coloured area, along the bottom of this graph.
While the green colour in this image looks to be a different shape to the graph above, keep in mind here that the scale is completely different, and that green coloured Wind total is the same as for the image shown above, only with the scale changed so it can fit onto the graph.
Notes
- Finding Wind Power Average – On the graph, there are 25 hourly time points, starting with midnight and finishing with midnight. I have added the total at each of those hourly time points together, and divided the resultant total by 25 to give an average in MegaWatts. (MW)
- For total power in GWH, multiply the average daily power by 24, and then divide by 1000.
- For the Capacity Factor, that is calculated by dividing the average wind generation by the current Nameplate and then multiplying that by 100 to give a percentage.
Comments For This Day
Wind generation was lower on this day than it was on the day before, and the average for this day of 2648MW gave wind generation a daily operational Capacity Factor or 26.9%, and that was four percent lower than the year round average. Wind generation was up and down for the day, and at the usual time of the evening Peak of maximum power consumption, wind was not far off its low for the day, and at that time, wind was delivering 6.8% of all the generated power from every source. While it was up and down, the difference between the low for the day and the high was not as large as usual, and that gap on this day was 1665MW.
*****
Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz, and he writes at this site, PA Pundits International on topics related to electrical power generation, from all sources, concentrating mainly on Renewable Power, and how the two most favoured methods of renewable power generation, Wind Power and all versions of Solar Power, fail comprehensively to deliver levels of power required to replace traditional power generation. His Bio is at this link.
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Dick Kleeman
Wed 06/22/2022
Tony,
Thanks for the explanation and the link. The reason I asked is in looking at some of your results I wondered how many turbines might be unserviceable. In 2019 when I flew from Ceduna to Port Augusta one morning I flew over the wind farm to the south west of Port Augusta and there were only seven turning out of 28 even though the wind was blowing at 25 knots or more. The next day we were in Broken Hill and drove out to Silverton where again the wind farm on the Mundi Mundi plains had many not turning with a strong wind prevalent.
It would be interesting to know how many are out at any one time as gear box and bearing problems are huge because of strong wind and directional changes. I suppose no wind farm is going to publish how many are out each day but they should as any coal fired plant has to report an outage. I am totally against the stupidity of the things and the huge waste of taxpayer money but we need facts to publicise it. The two turbines up on Thursday island haven’t worked for years because of strong winds and maintenance to expensive to keep them operational. Dick
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Dick Kleeman
Wed 06/22/2022
Right now they are producing 16% and 22% respectively with wind gusting to 30 kph at Port Augusta and Broken Hill at height
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TonyfromOz
Wed 06/22/2022
Thanks Dick, and really, you are never going to know.
We keep hearing that wind is now the cheapest form of power generation, and it’s just so much BS really. The actual maintenance costs on wind plant turbines is horrendous. At a coal fired Unit, you have ONE unit at ground level to service. With a wind plant it’s anything up to (and more than) a hundred Units, all of them at skyscraper height. There are stairs inside, but imagine walking up thousands of stairs inside a very confined space to work again in a very very confined space inside the nacelle, and to carry all your equipment and spares needed as well. Nearly every wind plant has to hire a helicopter to insert the workers. The costs of maintenance are so horrendous, that it’s sometimes cheaper to leave the Unit isolated and turned off than it is to service it. Again, that’s something you’ll NEVER know, and they wouldn’t tell you anyway even if requested. And they are more fragile than coal fired Units as well.
All of that adds to the reason why the Capacity Factor is so low for wind generation, and has just not improved over the years. That’s one of the reasons I have been keeping that data I keep on that daily basis, to actually show that. We are also being told that the newer ones are so much more reliable and that in time, that Capacity Factor will increase as more and more new ones are added to the grid, and again, that’s just not true, as my data bears out. Over the four years I have been keeping this data on that daily basis now, the CF has stayed virtually the same, at that figure of 30%. In that time, the total Nameplate for wind generation has almost doubled with so many new Plants added to the grid, and that CF is still at that 30% figure it was when I first started doing it. I have used that 30% here for Australia for more than twelve years now, and one of the reasons I started to keep this data was that I was told it was improving year on year, and that the 30% figure was a ….. GROSS understatement. It’s actually totally accurate.
Tony.
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Dick Kleeman
Wed 06/22/2022
Tony, are you able to see how many turbines are working in a wind farm on any day? I have seen many not working sometimes. Just wondering if that information was available.
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TonyfromOz
Wed 06/22/2022
Dick Kleeman
thanks for the comment here.
This is a tricky one to answer correctly, and that is the ONLY reason that this reply is soooooo long, just to answer it correctly.
In one word yes, that information probably is available, and it probably could be done, but it would not be an easy task, So from that, you can now see how easy it is for the pro green lobby wind supporters to ‘get away with’ saying what they say about wind being so good, because no one can really disprove what they say without an awful lot of work.
So, here’s how something like that could be done. You would need to know which wind plant to look at, and here in Australia, there are currently 76 separate wind plants. Okay, you would then have to look up each individual wind plant to see the total Nameplate, and what size the generators are inside the nacelles on top of each tower. With that information, you can work out the number of Units at that wind plant. Then you would need to find somewhere which detailed the output from each wind plant, and using the number of units, you could work out how many of them were operational at any one point in time. Can you now see that while the task can be done, it now becomes a task of immense difficulty ….. and here a task that could only be achieved by someone who intimately KNEW what to look for, how to do it, and had the time to do it.
So, then, let’s look at an example then. And here, we’ll use the Macarthur wind plant in Victoria. (now the third largest wind plant in Australia) So here, we now need to know the Nameplate (420MW) and then you need to find the website for Macarthur wind and find out how many towers there are and the size of each generator on top of each tower, and for this plant there are 140 of them, and each generator is 3MW.
Here’s the link to the website where I get all my data from. Once you are there, that’s the overall general page. From that, you need to isolate out just the Wind plant data. So, look down the right hand side of the page and you’ll see a heading titled ‘About the Australian Electricity Grid’. In the text, you’ll see the highlighted links to all the sources, so you need to look at the one link for ….. wind power. (and here, rather than do all of that, here’s the link to that wind power page.)
This shows the default at the current data for the actual time you just clicked onto the site. So here, at the top right of that page, in the black heading, you see the day and the time. Click on that and when the calendar comes up for this Month, change the date to yesterday, (and here that day would be Wednesday 22 June 2022) When that page opens, you see the default graph there for all 76 wind plants, and here the default shows the Capacity Factor (%) for each wind plant, each one a different colour. So, to now get the power output, see at the top right of that graph it has % and MW. Well here, now click on MW, and a black line appears showing the total power output across the day for all 76 wind plants.
Under the graph is the list of each of those 76 wind plants, all coded with their AEMO code. Each of those 76 plants has the box alongside it ticked, so each plant’s total is added to the overall total, that black line on the graph.
At the bottom of the coded list is listed the five States in the AEMO coverage area. Above that you see at the end of the codes, the boxes for sub total and total.
So, here we want just the information for Macarthur wind, so, now, untick the boxes for every state and also untick the box for Total ….. and now you should have a blank graph.
Okay, now tick just the box for Macarthur wind, coded as MACARTH1. What you now see on the graph is the total output across the day for the Macarthur wind plant. The data is listed for time across the page and you can see that as you hover your mouse across the page, anywhere at all. Do it slowly, and you can see that the data is updated every five minutes, and the data is shown in real time, as the page is updated every five minutes.
Pick a point in time across the day, and here, I’ll make it easy and pick the low point for the day shown here as 18:00, so that’s 6PM.
The total here is 19MW. So in the five minutes leading up to 6PM, Macarthur wind had six of its 140 towers with the blades actually turning and generating power. SIX OF THEM.
Okay, now why I detailed every step here is to show you how the exercise CAN actually be done ….. but to show you just how difficult that task actually is.
There are 76 individual wind plants that you can check, and there are 288 individual time points across the day, and also, the information dates back to the very day that the wind plant came on line, so in the case of Macarthur Wind, all the way back to its opening in January of 2013, although the data at this site only goes back to March of 2014, so there are a little more than 3000 days, so more than 864,000 individual time points that could feasibly be checked, just for Macarthur Wind alone.
The task would be monumental.
Also, as a generalisation here, and one I have occasionally used, you could do a similar task for the overall representation, and here, note I used the word ‘generalisation’. For that same day, go back to the total for very wind plant in the Country. The overall total Nameplate is is now 9854MW, and while the total number of turbines all up would be difficult and also a long task to find out, the generalised number might be roughly calculated. The current average for all turbines is (around) 3MW, so that means there are around 3280 individual turbines across Australia. So, same day, only now the total power, then at the low point for the day, just before 6PM, then the total output is 1270MW, and at a 3MW average, then at that low point in time for this day, there were only 420 of those towers which had their blades turning over and generating power, but again, that’s just a generalisation. 420 out of 3280.
And therein lies the sneakiness behind those green lobby wind supporters. They KNOW that no one will ever go and check ….. even if they knew how to go and check in the first place.
I didn’t do all of this to have a go, just to show you how big something like this really is, so I hope this helps you here. Sometimes, a seemingly simple question cane become so involved.
Tony.
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PA Pundits - International
Thu 06/23/2022
Tony, Thanks for the good information.
The Fearmongers and the Greedy, certainly do not want to make it easy for us to see through their Lies!
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