Events in Queensland on 25 May 2021 tested the resilience of the Queensland demand/supply balance with 3GW of coal generation suddenly coming offline due to a loss of generation at the Callide power station. According to AEMO’s preliminary report – released on 1 June 2021 – on the event, the outage also led to a cascading event of generator trips and network failures across a couple of sites some distance away from the Callide power station.
In this ‘Chart of the week’, we take a closer look at how the Queensland supply/demand stack evolved through the day via a time-of-day analysis. We also discuss what the impact of such events could mean for the market going forward. As the reliability of ageing coal assets across multiple regions are likely to contribute significantly to intraday volatility as they approach the end of their technical lives and are required to respond flexibly to market signals throughout the renewable transition.