Australian Weekly Wind Power Generation Data – 1May 2023 To 7May 2023

By Anton Lang ~

This continuing Series of Posts will detail the daily data for wind generation from all the Industrial Wind Plants on the major Australian Grid. This Series continues the data collection for all Australian wind power which was started on 1 October 2018. The original Series was started to show a definitive and accurate Capacity Factor Percentage for all the Australian wind plants on the main Australian power grid, and this new Series will continue to add to both of those Long Term Capacity Factor averages, shown directly under the Table below.

For an Introduction to this Series, and an explanation for the table, and the background, go to the following Post at the highlighted link. This introductory Post also shows the permanent link to all Posts in this Series.

Australian Weekly Wind Power Generation Data – Introduction And Permanent Link To All Data Post

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 10277MW, and this is from the current total of 79 wind plants.

Wind Nameplate change from beginning of data collection on Monday 1 October 2018 – (then) 5301MW – (now) 10277MW – (Change) +4976MW (an increase of 94%)

Current Wind Nameplate Capacity – 10277MW

Day And Date	Total Generated Power	Average Power	Capacity Factor (%)	Power To Grid (%)
Monday 1May2023	24.38GWH	1016MW	9.89%	4.4%
Tuesday 2May2023	91.32GWH	3805MW	37.02%	16.2%
Wednesday 3May2023	128.35GWH	5348MW	52.04%	22.6%
Thursday 4May2023	24.67GWH	1028MW	10.00%	4.1%
Friday 5May2023	72.21GWH	3009MW	29.28%	12.9%
Saturday 6May2023	51.26GWH	2136MW	20.78%	9.5%
Sunday 7May2023	82.68GWH	3455MW	33.52%	14.9%
This Week	474.87GWH	2827MW	27.50%	12.1%

Long Term Capacity Factor – 52 weeks -29.83% (Last Week – 29.75%)

Long Term Capacity Factor – 240 weeks -30.06% (Last Week – 30.07%)

Comments for this week.

Wednesday/Thursday (3/4May2023)

Wind Generation ‘Crash’

Over 15 hours and 40 minutes across these two days, wind generation crashed spectacularly. I have recorded this in a lot of detail earlier in the three Posts at this link. (This Link is just to the introduction, and the two further Posts are at the links at the bottom of this Introductory Post)

The loss of power generation across those nearly 16 hours was an astonishingly huge 5964MW. The image above shows it all, and it indicates the complete fall and here I have included the whole large chart so you can see that this covers every wind plant across the whole of the vast AEMO coverage area, virtually the whole of Australia. The total Nameplate for all wind plants is 10277MW, so the vastness of this loss of power is in fact quite huge. On that image (and if you click on the image above and those below, they will open in a new window and at a much larger size so you can better see the detail) I have shown the maximum power just prior to the fall, 6367MW at 3.25PM on the Wednesday, and the low point, 421MW at 8.05AM on Thursday morning, just 15 hours and fifty minutes later.

As in the earlier Posts, I can again show that this was solely caused by the movement of a large High Pressure weather system which moved across the area where there is the largest concentration of wind plants, in the South West of South Australia, and Central Western Victoria, and here for clarity I have circled in red that area on the first of those images above.

The first image (with that red circle) shows the time of the Chart , indicated in the box at lower left on the chart and that was at 10AM 0n the Wednesday, and as you can see from the isobars ‘flowing’ across that area inside the circle, and this indicates that the wind was indeed blowing quite strongly, and because of that, wind generation was quite high.

The second image shows (again time indicated in that box on the chart at lower left of the chart) that the High Pressure weather system has moved almost directly over that same area, and because of that, the wind all but ceases blowing, almost to nothing, and why wind generation is now so low.

For some perspective, ALL of the coal fired power in Victoria have a Nameplate of 4960MW, for three power plants with 10 Units, and that’s lower than the loss of power from ALL of these wind plants. If something like that failed (all 10 Units of the coal fired power in that State of Victoria) the State would be totally blacked out.

The same would apply for the State of New South Wales, where the total Nameplate for all of its coal fired plants is now 6149MW from four power plants with 12 Units (and that total is now lower since the recent closure of the Liddell plant, removing 2000MW for that coal fired total Nameplate for that State), and if all those 12 Units shut down, then that State would also be blacked out.

These are the two most populous States in Australia, and if something like that happened, it would be quite literally catastrophic, and it would be screamed about in the media (when the power did come back on) about the absolute and stupendous unreliability of coal fired power.

Luckily, in this case, with wind generation, there were many natural gas fired plants, and hydro power plants to take up the slack of such an immense loss of power, and because of that, and the fact that this is renewable power, now the sacred cow of the media, no one even knew, and it was not reported, huh, not that anyone even knew of this correlation in the first place.

And the worst part of all of this is that those same two States are constructing more and more wind plants ….. IN THAT SAME AREA. As this case shows, the more wind power plants you construct in that same area, the scale of the power loss will only become even larger, as is shown here when compared to the losses shown in the earlier Posts.

This again proves that wind power is a failure at what it is SUPPOSED to do ….. deliver power.

Weekly Update

Wind generation again had a week when there was a large high, and two days with generation lower than ten percent, with two days a little above the average, another day lower than the average, and one day right on the average. So, all up this week came out a little lower than the year round average, and that took the long term average a tick lower, and the most recent year long average a tick higher, with last year’s equivalent week being just a touch higher than this week. And yet again, note the irony when I write that wind had one day when power generation was very good, and yet, that very good phrase means that wind generation was operating at 52%, just a tick over HALF of its total Nameplate in operation across the whole day.

*****

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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Tagged: Australian Electrical Power Consumption, Australian Electrical Power Statistics, Australian Renewable Power, Wind Power Generation, Wind Power Limitations

Posted in: Australia, Climate Change, Electrical Power Generation, Renewable Energy, Wind Power