Gannawarra Solar Farm in western Victoria,was one of the plants to have its output cut in half in September 2019 by AEMO.
In addition,as many as six other projects in Victoria or southern NSW have been told by AEMO to wait nine months or more before they can be connected to the grid,an industry executive said. A senior official at a separate investment group confirmed similar numbers of delays.
"AEMO approved all of these new generation connections and the generators’ only apparent ‘crime’ - for which they are now being severely economically punished - is that they followed through on Connection Agreement contracts approved by AEMO,"said the executive,who asked to remain anonymous to avoid being penalised for speaking out.
"If AEMO had performed their role as the network planner properly,they would have forecast these problems occurring well beforehand,thereby avoiding pushing these projects to the economic brink after they are built."
AEMO will hold a western Murray"technical forum"on Monday to discuss how to resolve the sector's woes.
The Broken Hill solar farm has been affected by transmission constraints.
"The scale and pace of inverter-based (solar and wind) generation connected in electrically remote areas of the National Electricity Market (NEM) is presenting unprecedented technical issues affecting grid performance and operational stability in those areas,"a spokesman said.
"This is an emerging phenomenon that has not been seen at scale in other developed power systems around the world,"he said,adding that the issues were the result of the heavy concentration of new renewable energy plants"in an area that is weakly connected to the ‘backbone’ of the grid".