This week national hydro storage dropped 1% and dropped 2% of average for the time of year. When drilling down to the specific islands, the North Island rose by 6% and the South island dropped by 2%. A few points to note on hydro storage:

1. The North Island hydro storage has made a marked improvement over the last few months. It has more than doubled since August when it dropped to 25% of full, it is now 56% of full.
2. Storage levels at Manapouri and Te Anau are 107% of controllable storage levels indicating spill is likely to be occurring, but it does appear to be abating.
3. Snow pack above the Waitaki hydro catchment typically peaks at this time of year and was last reported as 108% of average for time of year on Meridian’s website.

NIWA have indicated a La Nina event is probable; this can impact regional rainfall. See here for some more details on how inflows have tracked in previous La Nina events.

Turning our heads to thermal generation, after a short stint of operation last week TCC pulled back out of the market on the 19^th October.

Gas production from the Pohokura gas field has been declining at a rate of around 0.5 TJ/day since early September and is now at 153 TJ/day, down from a production level of 200 TJ/day in May. OMV have notified a series of outages in early November with the stated purpose as being for well maintenance.

Nationally, weekly electricity reversed the seasonal trend and rose slightly by 1% to 785GWh due to some cooler weather and rising irrigation demand in the South Island. For more details see Transpower’s weekly market summary here.

Renewable generation made up 80.1% of the mix.

Due to a transformer tripping on the 14^th October, 15MW of load was lost at Maungaturoro in Northland for approximately 3 hours.

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