I posted last year regarding Nova, and its just a repeat if anybody wants to review. The high efficiency Nova units are the first on of all the peaker plants. The price has to go very high before other (less efficient) peakers such as those installed at other Latrobe Valley sites operate. I can confirm that nova is running at full capacity even with the price below $200/MW.hr. The heat plumes from the exhausts is a giveaway. At a current gas price around $10/GJ anything above $100 per MW.hr is profit for Nova. And yes at $14500 per hour is was basically making @ 10 MW output $145000 per hour.
As Ash said the hydro units cant be used as peakers, they are held hostage by the water uses and generally when peak load is required in summer they have no water to give. Blue Rock in fact uses a water powered pump to pump to the nearby Moondarra reservoir if it is low and this energy then cant be used for electrical generation.
Another point of interest is another unit at Loy Yang was crippled yesterday but was held on at the request of AEMO at reduced output (300 MW instead of nominal 550). it is off now of so even with the mild weather expect energy prices to remain high with 4 units of in the Latrobe Valley totaling about 1850 MW unavailable. Its a topic for the political debates but does mean Nova will be required more than it probably should (the lack of reserve base load is the issue, previous government run institution always has a viable reserve unit which we paid for through indirect means, but leave that for the other forum)
The issue of uprooting units not being utilised is interesting and I believe in the west this is a common practice for contracted mine energy supplies. A mine is reducing its energy requirement, put a couple of generators on a truck and take them to a new site that requires energy. This wont happen to Nova however, as the original installation was put in to avoid an expensive power system upgrade (poles and wires) and as far as I know is still required for network reasons in its current location. I do not now if the PEA contract has a component to keep this function available. It may be an additional income stream we don't know we have, or as suggested a bargaining chip should prices be continually depressed.
On batteries do not underestimate how big a battery would needed to be to operate at 10 MW for the time Nova has operated over the last few days. It would be several hundred times larger than the South Australian model, which operates to stabilise the grid for short periods ( less than 1 hour) whilst emergency generation (peaker plants, diesels in SA!) start.
PEA Price at posting:
59.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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