A quick note, including a snapshot taken on Monday 27th June combining NEM-Watch and GasWatch to record how a confluence of factors (including high gas prices, low wind production and post-closure of coal generation at Northern) was leading to higher prices that day in the South Australian region.
Of course, a one-off 5-minute dispatch price of $410.42/MWh is not so exceptional – what’s more exceptional has been how prices have been consistently higher for a longer period of time – such as can be seen here in this trended chart from NEM-Review highlighting daily average prices for the past (approx) 540 days:
Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients.
Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.
The multi-region islanding event on Saturday 25th August was a very rare event – perhaps the only one’s that occurred in the history of the NEM. It has generated plenty of questions – and driven our analysis further. We share some more observations here, and keenly await the draft AEMO report.
A Market Event Report has been published on the NEMMCO website discussing the market outcomes of the high energy prices in the New South Wales and Queensland regions on Friday, 31 October 2008.
With demand soaring, and interconnectors constrained, generators in South Australia and Victoria took what opportunity they had to force the price high. So successful were the South Australian generators that the Cumulative Price Threshold was reached in South Australia and, under NEM Rules, an Administered Price Cap was applied for a period of time.
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