It's nighttime and there is no wind. That's the downside of extrapolating from real-time data.

A couple of highlights from Australia's energy transition story in the last few days, which show some of the work being done at state level in spite of a largely renewables-hostile federal government over the last several years:

> the Western Australia grid ... reached 82 per cent renewables for a half-hour period on October 30 ... and it is likely that new peak is the highest for any gigawatt-scale grid in the world.

> South Australia ... has established the world’s highest share of renewables – as a percentage of demand – in any gigawatt scale grid in the world, when it reached 146 per cent on September 14. The excess is, of course, exported to the neighbouring state, in this case Victoria.

-- https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-stunning-wind-and-solar-leap... [2022-11-04]

> [NSW is seeking] solutions on replacing 10GW of coal capacity that is likely to leave the grid within the next decade.

> Those plans are being accelerated by fast-tracked closures of the main coal generators, including Liddell early next year, Eraring in 2025, and Bayswater as early as 2030. Vales Point is expected to close by 2029, leaving Mt Piper with the only uncertain closure time.

-- https://reneweconomy.com.au/nsw-formally-declares-its-third-... [2022-11-04]

We had ~10 years of a government in the pocket of fossil fuel companies. It’s that simple. Our last PM brought a piece of coal into parliament as a prop, telling everyone that they shouldn’t be afraid of it. The bloke genuinely took the “let God deal with it” strategy, which is more palatable or at least common in the US, but was quite jarring here.

With a new government and increased market pressures, the tides are turning, quite erratically though, because of time/market pressure, mismanagement, incompetence, opportunistic capitalists, and whatever else.

Worked in energy as a quant a few years back: the current 'greening' of the grid is nothing of the sort. It's just a cash grab by creating extreme volatility in energy prices. On the right (wrong) days you had swings of $10,000 USD within 5 minutes of each other.

The net result was the grid being taken over by the government after a series of rolling blackouts in a number of states and letting everything rip. All this is was directly attributed to _one_ coal station going offline unexpectedly and losing the baseload it generated.

I can write a book on how fucked the market here is.