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National hydro storage has started to decrease, with spill occurring at many South Island lakes as storage exceeds nominal full. South Island storage is now at 109% of full and the North Island 87% of full. Renewable generation was 88% of total generation over the last 7 days.
Transpower has advised it will hold an industry conference call on 20 December to discuss the restoration plan for the damaged Islington-Roxburgh line, which involves the immediate implementation of a temporary solution which is expected to be completed by April 2020. In parallel, a permanent solution is being worked on. For more information, refer to this CAN.
The December update of the Electricity Risk Curves (ERC) has been published. The risk curves from December 2019 to June 2020 declined slightly as the only change was updates to planned outages over the next eight months. We have assessed the availability of thermal fuel supply and concluded that a thermal de-rating is not required for this ERC update. Our current forecast of thermal fuel availability covers December through to February.
In next month’s ERC update, we will assess thermal fuel availability from January to March. During this time there is a planned outage at the Pohokura gas field, and the owners recently announced that the undersea pipeline will be closed close to the start of the gas field outage and remain closed for one to three weeks after the field’s expected return to service. These updates can be seen here on the GIC website.
This week we will be publishing our quarterly update to the ERC and SST thermal scenarios. This includes an assessment of the standard quarterly scenarios (a Gas Pipeline scenario and a Gas Supply Shortage scenario) as well as an update to the Early 2020 Thermal Constraints scenario. The Early 2020 Thermal Constraints scenario will be updated again in January to include the most recent information relating to the Pohokura outage.
A final reminder that major HVDC outages are planned from January to April next year. These coincide with gas industry outages at Pohokura and Ahuroa. We have previously carried out analysis for this period which can be found here and we do not currently foresee any risk to security of supply.
This is the last Security of Supply report for the year. We wish everyone a happy holiday season, and our security of supply reporting will commence again in the new year on 16 January.
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