Best performing NEM turbines

Hi there, today is Friday, 18th of October, and you’re listening to WindFront, the weekly roundup of the wind industry from Australia and around the world. Hey, instead of covering the weekly top three earners, I’m going to take a deeper dive into the last financial quarter to see who came out on top.

So I’ve been collecting data between the 20th of June and the 17th of October, which covers the last financial quarter. I’m going to have a look at some of the detail to see other than pure revenue, which obviously the title would go to Macarthur being the largest wind farm. When I look at some of the other factors that would make a great wind farm. So we have a look at the 1st one, which is the capacity factor. Which is a measure of how much the wind farm’s actually running. So, say, a capacity factor of 100% might mean that the wind farm is running at full speed the entire time. So you’re getting the full output from the turbines, whereas the capacity factor of 0% would mean that the turbines aren’t running at all. And so to measure this, I’ve taken the energy output of each of the turbines at a wind farm, and then divided that by the install capacity at the wind farm, the energy that would have been produced during that same time.

So the top three: Hallet 1, Woolnorth, and Hallet 2. So we’ve got two South Australian wind farms there, Hallet 1 and Hallet 2, and Woolnorth in Tasmania. All 3 of them are on just about 50% capacity factor for this quarter, which is really huge. Their installed capacities aren’t small either. We’ve got, you know, almost 100 megawatts at Hallet 1, over 100 megawatts at Woolnorth, and a 70 megawatt installation at Hallet 2.

Now we look at the dollars earned per megawatt of installed capacity. So I wanted to try and break down whether or not large wind farms had an advantage over smaller wind farms by normalising the amount of money earned by the amount of installed capacity. So obviously, a really large wind farm like Macarthur would no longer be an advantage. The way we calculate these figures, we calculate the total amount earned over the quarter and then divide that by the installed capacity at the wind farm to arrive at a dollar per megawatt value. And the top 3 again: Hallet 1 and Hallet 2 taking 1st and 2nd position followed by North Brown Hill. Now again, these aren’t small. They’re all fairly large. The largest being North Brown Hill at around almost or just over 130 megawatt. So again, South Australia, one and 2 and 3 with North Brown Hill as well. Now, I looked later on, we’ll have a look at how the dollar in South Australia might be affecting these results, just bear in mind that the price in South Australia is higher than average.

I also looked at the lowest 3 in terms of dollars per megawatt of installed capacity. Now, this doesn’t include all wind farms in the state. There’s a couple of wind farms which we don’t get data for. So some of the smaller ones, like Hepburn and other places like that, which I suspect would be lower again. But the lowest 3 are Musselroe, Portland, and Starfish Hill. There is one South Australian wind farm in there, but the other one is in Tasmania, Musselroe, and Victoria for Portland. So the lowest 3 are earning, you know, just over 50 to $60,000 per megawatt in a quarter, and the highest ones are just under nudging $100,000. So the difference between the lowest and the highest is a factor of two. So Hallet 1 is doubling Musselroe in Tasmania, dollars per megawatt installed.

Finally, let’s have a look at the wind weighted average dollars. Now, what this one might need a little bit of explanation in that the average price of electricity. If you just take a straight average over all the different periods, you might come up with a number of, say, $50 per megawatt hour. But the wind doesn’t blow in every 5 minute period. So there’ll be times where the wind’s blowing more strongly and there’ll be times where the wind is blowing less strongly. And so what this tries to do is this measurement, the wind weighted average dollars, tries to understand, is the wind blowing at times when the price is high, or is it not? So if it turns out that, like, a wind turbine has an average wind weighted price of, say, $70, I mean, that’s far and away exceeding the average based on time of $50. You know that the wind’s blowing very strongly at times when the pool price is high.

Now, the top 3 turbines by wind weighted average dollars. We’re all in South Australia, no surprises there. And we’re looking at around about $64, $63 per megawatt hour. Now, compare that to the average pool price in South Australia, which was $68. So the highest, though there, $64 compared to the $68, shows that the turbines are running at times on average that are a little bit less than the average pool price, which I guess kind of make sense in some respects, especially in South Australia, in that when the wind is blowing, they’re all potentially blowing and that may depress the price for electricity. Whereas when all the wind turbines are off, then the price may go up a little, because you no longer have that supply from the wind coming into the market. So we’ve got Cathedral Rocks, the best off, and then Lake Bonney 2 and 3, all on around about $64 per megawatt hour.

And the average pool prices, you might be interested to see. As I mentioned before, $68 per megawatt hour in South Australia, by far and away, exceeding the prices in all the other states. The next highest being $58 or just under $59 in Queensland. So you’ve got a good almost $10 per megawatt hour between South Australia and the next highest. So it looks like at this point in time, especially in this last quarter, South Australia, some very high prices, and the other states seem to be more reasonable, especially Victoria and New South Wales, both on about $55 per megawatt hour.

Now, that price in South Australia being so high, obviously skews most of the results, especially like the dollars per installed megawatt capacity, and the wind weighted average dollars would also be skewed that way. Obviously, the higher price being in South Australia has pulled up those values. So what I’ve tried to do in the next bit is account for the high prices in South Australia. I mean, South Australian turbines, as I mentioned, they’ve taken the honours for the most earned per megawatt and the wind weighted average dollars. So this section, we are normalising by the pool price, and we’re normalising it to an average of about $55 per megawatt hour for each state. Then once I’ve normalised the prices, then I go ahead and do the dollars per megawatt installed just to have a look to see what other states pop up once the high prices in South Australia taken out.

And Gunning, Woodlawn and Woolnorth are the 3 highest. So once you’ve normalised to an average price of $55 per megawatt hour in each state, Gunning is on $82,000 per megawatt installed in a quarter and Woolnorth being the best in Tasmania, just under $90,000 per megawatt installed. Now, the interesting is there’s a mix of smaller wind farms on around about 40 odd megawatt. And the larger one, Woolnorth, 140 megawatt. So it really doesn’t seem to be discriminating based on size of the wind farm. And for a wind farm to make really large dollars per installed megawatt, they must have been able to have a very high capacity factor and they must be limiting their downtime and their maintenance to periods where there isn’t much wind.

So that’s it for this week. Just a bit of a detour to look at the quarter that was to get an idea of which ones are the best and worst performing turbines in the state. And until I see you next time, keep buying those green electrons.