There’s been discussion internally about how prices have been largely subdued over quite a few months now (including through summer 2025-26).  Plenty of people have written about the ‘rise and rise of battery storage (both small and large)’ as one of the contributing factors.

So it’s worth a quick initial note to record the events over the past 24 hours:

 

A sharp spike in Tasmania on Sunday evening 21st June 2026

On Sunday evening 21st June 2026, we saw a couple price blips in Tasmania – for ENERGY and FCAS, as recorded in this snapshot from the new ez2view mobile application:

 

 

A prolonged period of volatility in South Australia, from Sunday evening 21st June 2026

Beginning a bit later on Sunday evening 21st June 2026, we saw an initial spike in South Australia for the 19:35 Dispatch interval (NEM time), and this continued through the evening:

This snapshot from NEMwatch at 07:30 (NEM time) highlights how the price action in South Australia has continued through the night and into Monday morning 22nd June 2026:

In the NEMwatch snapshot you can see the Market Notice I’ve selected … which is the only one I can remember starting with the negative:

‘MN 144305     RESERVE NOTICE     21/06/2026 08:45:41 PM

PDPASA – Lack Of Reserve Level 2 (LOR2) condition NOT declared in the SA Region on 21/06/2026

AEMO ELECTRICITY MARKET NOTICE

PD PASA indicates LOR2 condition is forecasted from 2030 hrs to 2100 hrs on 21/06/2026 in SA Region.

AEMO considers the forecast condition to be transient and will be resolved through normal dispatch processes without presenting an ongoing threat to reliability of supply as changes to market conditions that will be captured in the next run are likely to resolve the LOR2 condition. Hence AEMO will not issue a LOR2 forecast declaration for this period.

AEMO will continue to monitor the reserve conditions and declare an LOR condition in subsequent PASA runs, if required.

Manager NEM Real Time Operations’

 

We’ll come back to this later (time permitting) but have other things to do before then …