I couldn't miss this opportunity! Adelaide recently experienced its hottest day in recorded history! It was 46.6 degrees Celsius in the city! This occurred on the 24/01/19.

Two years ago South Australia experienced a state-wide blackout and in response we have had the largest lithium-ion battery in the world installed by Elon Musk and additional emergency generators installed to help prevent future blackouts such as this. Storage and backups like this are especially important due to our weather which basically ensures that every air-conditioner in the country is turned when every one gets home and the solar panels start to ramp down. Normally SA can import power from our neighbouring state Victoria, but they has a similar problem on that day. In addition, Victoria couldn't import any power from their neighbour New South Wales as the link was down (likely due to the heat!).

So, with all that in mind, here's the state of the Australian electrical grid at 9pm that day.

The prices above are in AU$ per mega watt-hour. Yes, that says $14,500, it actually hit the market cap.

You may notice that the inter state links are NOT maxed out. I believe this is because the market operator would rather leave them as a backup and instead first rely on the more expensive (but reliable) emergency generation within the states (the SA-VIC link tripping is what caused the previous SA blackout). However, I'm not a market operator so that's just my guess. Though I can confirm that when the prices suddenly dropped back down to $100 per MWh, the links did take the load as the emergency options were shut down.

Here's the demand curve and the wholesale price:

And here's a blackout map:

According to a news report from the ABC, these blackouts were caused by blown fuses on transformers and not load shedding (which is what is looks like according to the map above). Apparently, it was still 35 degrees Celsius at 10pm (a time with no local solar production throughout the neighbourhoods). See:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-25/sa-blackouts-related-to-heat-not-network-sapn-says/10748884

So, what did I record? I had to work during the day, but I did record the grid from 6pm-9.40pm:

The hottest time was about 5pm, so I did miss the peak, but you can still see some fun stuff.

Yes, I would have left it running all day, but ironically it would have heated the room that my family was trying not to burn to death in (i.e. in front of the air-conditioner).

Also I'm sorry I didn't record any actual audio - It's a difficult process due to weird reasons.

Here's a zoom of the spectrum from above:

Anyway, I'm happy there wasn't a blackout, but I'm scared to think how this will affect electricity prices going forwards.

I'll upload one more little treat tonight once it's done.