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.
On 19th January, high prices were sustained in SA for several hours, bringing the Cumulative Price within a whisker of the $150,000 threshold, at which prices would be capped.
Saturday evening 25th July 2021 saw the instantaneous production from wind farms across the NEM surge past 6,000MW for the first time and set a new ‘all-time’ record that’s substantially higher than the previous record (set only a few days beforehand).
Just as had been forecast, Tuesday 13th January 2009 saw hot, dry weather roll in across South Australia, and then into Victoria. The high temperatures caused demand to climb, but not to the level at which NEMMCO had forecast demand to climb over the summer period. As a result we saw the price in SA jump to a level near VOLL at 13:40, and remain there until about 18:00 (i.e. more than 4 hours).
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