Of course, it’s also got a use to demonstrate that the National Party heartland is in the most vulnerable state in Australia to climate change, with some $3 billion of flood damage in 2019 and crippling drought in southern Queensland.
One of the “predictions” of the renewable energy industry – kind of like a climate change testable hypothesis, but let’s not go there – is that as the wind industry diversifies geographically, its aggregate variability will also decline. I.e. If it’s not windy here, it will be windy there.
This is the “portfolio” effect. The benefit depends on the co-variance of one wind farm with others. The most valuable assets, in terms of reducing the portfolio variance, are those that are negatively correlated with the aggregate.
More specifically, the industry believed that wind generation in Queensland is likely to be less correlated with other regions’ wind resources.
Up until now we haven’t been able to test the latter part of that because there hasn’t been any wind generation in Queensland.
However, we now have about nine months of output from Mt Emerald wind farm (soon to be supplemented with Cooper’s Gap). Even the Kennedy wind farm may one day be connected to the grid.
This gave ITK an opportunity to use NEM Review, that great product from Global Roam, to re-run some correlations. We first wrote these up a couple of years ago but, as Bob Dylan was wont to sing, “Things have changed”.
The answers are not robust because nine months of data is far from sufficient. But what there is, is encouraging.
