The purpose of this post is to give stakeholders access to Q1 2020 data arising from the special stress test. All other stress test reports are available from our stress test dashboard.
Various asset owners planned outages of the HVDC link, Ahuroa gas storage and Pohokura gas field in Q1 2020. Given these factors, we wanted to make sure wholesale market participants were aware of the potential for spot price volatility and were pro-actively managing their exposure to spot price risks. As such, a special ‘inter-island price separation’ stress test was added for Q1 2020.
As the special stress test is expected to be a one-off or rare test, we have not integrated the Q1 2020 special test results into the regular stress test reports on EMI. However, the data associated with the special stress test is accessible from the wholesale datasets collection on EMI.
The special stress test scenario simulates a short period of very high wholesale electricity prices with very high inter-island price separation. The special stress test simulates North Island wholesale prices of roughly $10,000 MWh for eight hours, but differs from the standard test by instead simulating South Island prices remaining identical to the base case scenario of roughly $100 MWh. The stress test scenarios are published here.
As there are some similarities between the special and standard capacity stress test scenarios, we have included both in the following table that summarises the results.
Table 1: Summary of Q1 2020 results of capacity stress test scenarios
Every result in the above summary table shows that the special stress test scenario, relative to the standard stress test scenario for capacity, causes either no change or downward change.
