Limited influence of climate modes of variability on residual load in Australia's electricity grid

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Original abstract

Abstract Monitoring and predicting climate modes of variability, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), can be useful for informing decision-making in numerous sectors. The influence of climate modes on electricity demand, and wind and solar photovoltaic generation in Australia varies spatially and temporally, but studies have so far considered demand and generation separately. Here, we quantify for the first time the relationships between three major climate modes and residual load, which integrates supply and demand. For Australia's largest power system, we find that ENSO and the Indian Ocean Dipole have limited influence on residual load, both today and under future scenarios that model an increasingly renewables-dominated gird. This implies an overall resilience to climate mode variability. The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is weakly correlated with residual load (ρ = 0.3), but we find evidence of an asymmetric relationship, whereby a negative SAM more strongly influences residual load than its other phases. By imposing additional renewables capacity in strategic locations, we find it would require substantially more capacity to reduce variability associated with the SAM. Finally, we show that the ability to predict residual load with climate mode indices is limited, with random forest models outperforming benchmarks by a small margin (F1 scores of 0.5 compared to the benchmark of 0.33). Our work suggests that there is limited influence of climate modes on the grid overall, and efforts to improve climate information for the energy sector should prioritise the evaluation and development of seasonal predictions of wind speed and solar radiation directly.

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