The Australia National Electricity Market (NEM) and its Renewable Energy participants entered a new era on the 1st of October 2021 with the transition from 30-minute settlement (30MS) to 5-minute settlement (5MS).
This change ensures that compensation is aligned with real-time market pricing signals and should lead to more efficient operation of the grid and settlement transparency.
It is well known that certain operators (e.g. fast response fossil fuel generators) used the settlement averaging process in 30MS to ramp-up production whenever one of the 6 periods exceeded a threshold price point. Such practices are no longer possible with the change to 5MS. Further, causer-pays factors for regulation FCAS costs have also transitioned to 5MS to drive positive market participant performance.
The change to 5MS presents new operational challenges to wind farm and solar farm operators for real-time oversight over their operational portfolios.
The standard temporal data resolution for wind and solar SCADA: 10 and 5 minutes respectively, is no longer sufficient for real-time monitoring in the NEM.
Recognising this disparity in temporal resolution and by leveraging its market leading domain knowledge in Renewable Energy SCADA hardware and systems, GreenPowerMonitor (GPM) has developed real-time dashboards that live-stream high frequency data (up to 1second refresh rate) in its multi-technology asset management platform, GPM Horizon.
Such temporal resolution is typically only available with dedicated hardware onsite.
“With High Frequency Data functionalities, our customers are able to monitor their assets from GPM Horizon as if they were using a SCADA.” Andreu Pagès, Product Owner – Wind at GreenPowerMonitor.
The real-time dashboards in GPM Horizon thus empower NEM participants to monitor plant/portfolio status and performance data to rapidly alter market participation for more cost-effective operations.
GPM Horizon – One tool, a world full of possibilities.