This Lessons Learnt Report outlines the key learnings IMC has learnt in the period between October 2019 – April 2020.
Report extract
Objective: Demonstrate the ability to submit five-minute ahead self-forecasts via AEMO’s web based MP5F API
Implications for future projects: Significant variability in the response time of the AEMO forecast server has been experienced. This has caused forecasts for several dispatch intervals to miss the gate closure. The challenge here is that when submitting 7 seconds prior to the gate closure, the response time from the AEMO server varied from near instantaneous to 12 seconds (where any response time over 6-7 seconds would cause the gate closure to be missed), but submitting 9 seconds prior to the gate closure, only 2 seconds earlier, the response time is always near instantaneous, and at most less than 1 second.
Potentially, this is due to increased load of the AEMO servers near to the gate closure time. Ideally, the forecast submissions would be timestamped by the AEMO server as soon as they are received, rather than when they are processed in the queue. Unless changes are made at the AEMO server side this issue will become worse as more farms and forecast providers start submitting forecasts. The implication for future projects is that multiple submissions should be made, up to the gate closure to ensure that a valid forecast is received and available for use in dispatch.
