There’s a new article here where Vector is complaining that the govt isn’t moving on EV charging to get a smart charging setup. I think the idea is that the chargers should be controllable like some water heating, where the power controllers can disable them during peak times since many people charging cars plug them in when they get home (peak time) but don’t care if it’s charged then or some time overnight so long as it’s charged by morning.
This is an opportunity to have smart chargers retrieve a spot price and change their charging schedule based on this. We should also have smart solar setups where they charge a battery, then feed into the grid at peak times.
The open data situation for electricity information in New Zealand is “pretty good”. The main problem is that people in charge see commercial value in up-to-date cost and usage information so the “free data” is delayed. This prevents people from using near real-time data to improve efficiency of their own power systems.
What’s the barrier here? Data comes from the manager of the national grid, which is the government (Transpower), so what’s the commercial barrier to releasing that info? Transpower have nothing to gain.
It’s unlikely that a temp of -4C in Christchurch is the issue. Single digit negatives are normal across much of the country.
It may be that forecasts have cold temps across much of the country, so instead of it peaking in one area it might be everywhere. Or it might be the location of the generation that can’t get to where it’s forecast to be needed.
The article doesn’t help explain it. Hydro lakes aren’t particularly low. Is peak generation expected to be the highest ever? It’s not mentioned.
This is the kind of situation that variable supply rates for residential households would help. There are many people across the country running solar with batteries, imagine a system where you connect it to a server to get a spot price and have it supply electricity back to the grid at times of high spot prices (that would of course mean providers would have to do variable rates). This one hour period of a slight shortfall could probably easily be supplied by the battery capacity installed in residential homes.
The graph is in available GWh, which means it goes all the way to 0 before it stops being able to provide electricity. It’s just at the low end of normal but we are coming out of summer so that’s not surprising.
None of the lakes look like they can’t produce at maximum for an hour to cover the shortfall. So I’d guess hydro isn’t the problem. Hard to say why tomorrow is an issue though. Perhaps this snuck up on them, getting a fossil fuel power station up and running takes time, so maybe they could have covered it but weren’t prepared?
I tried to find historical data on peak load but could only find live data on current load. So I’m all out of guesses!
When I first posted this article, it was about 100 words long and I quoted most of it in the body if my post. It seems they fleshed it out significantly! Nice to have an answer!
In the article they mention this cold weather is earlier than normal, they have the plants shut down ahead of the super cold weather and got caught out by the cold coming so early.
Looks like the article has been fleshed out a lot more. They have a lot of the plants offline ahead of winter for maintenance to prepare for winter, but looks like they got caught out by unseasonably cold weather.
This page (down the page a bit) shows you’re right. But the second highest is the morning peak, and that graph is averages. In this case it’s an unseasonably cold morning across NZ so for this day in particular they are worried about everyone using their heating at the same time, their forecasts are probably for the morning to have a higher peak on this day in particular.
The original article has been fleshed out and they now say it’s because a lot of generation is offline for maintenance ahead of winter, and this cold weather is earlier than expected.
If you wanna poke around with some historical data yourself, I scrape a lot of it for my own curiosity, and have opened up my dashboard
The article got updated to say that capacity is down at the moment because of pre-winter maintenance, and the unseasonably cold weather means they weren’t prepared for this.
I hadn’t heard of Lenovo Vantage but came across this reddit thread that led me to this github page that might do the job for you?
If you don’t have another windows machine then I think it’s a good idea to duel boot Windows initially. I’ve been running Linux as a daily driver the past couple of years but still occasionally do stuff in Windows. It’s pretty rare these days, though!
So much for wanting a solution that wasn’t so expensive! It does sound like a fun project, though. For you, not for me, I’d be worried about electrocuting myself 😆
Charts and Graphs of NZ Electricity (lemmy.nz)
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