VOLL (or MPC) in NSW today as high temperatures stretch supplies

A quick note today to give you a  head’s up on what’s been happening.

See the following snapshot from NEM-Watch v8:

As you can see:

1)  Demand in NSW is relatively high (due to high temperatures) with reference to the all time minimum and maximum dispatch demand targets shown in the legend.

2)  A tight supply/demand balance in NSW has meant that imports have been required from both QLD and VIC.

3)  What appears to have been a drop in available generation capacity of 500MW in the NSW region (perhaps a unit trip) would not have helped the situation.

Hence prices have risen to the Market Price Cap (MPC) of $10,000/MWh

As can be seen in the following two charts of interconnector flows (generated with a single-click from NEM-Watch), we see that sudden changes in the import constraint limit (for QNI) and export constraint limit (for VIC-NSW) have been part of the issue (with the price spread across the interconnector shown, in each chart, in the grey bars):