Here at WattClarity it’s become an annual tradition for us to publish a review of Q2 prices shortly after the close of the quarter each year. We first kicked off this line of analysis back in 2016, when we began to observe an emerging shift in price dynamics at this time of the year — an early sign that the NEM was beginning to see new seasonal pricing patterns that we hadn’t previously experienced.

In the decade since, Q2 has overtaken Q1 as the most volatile quarter in the NEM, largely a function of the market’s growing exposure to VRE output, which is at its most unpredictable through Autumn and early Winter.

This post continues our long-running series by examining how prices in Q2 2026 compares to the broader trend.

Market conditions and underlying drivers

Before analysing pricing patterns across the quarter, it’s worth setting out some of the key market drivers at play, even if I won’t dig into them one by one. The list below isn’t exhaustive, nor ranked by importance — it’s just a snapshot of some of the broader factors that impacted prices over the quarter, providing context for the trends discussed later in this article:

• Battery capacity — both in front and behind the meter — continued to grow rapidly. At the utility-scale level, we’ve seen an acceleration of registered capacity since late 2024 (see the third chart in this article), and which is likely to grow into 2027 as several more gigawatts of battery projects enter commissioning. At the residential level, the federal government’s Cheaper Home Batteries Program has seen strong uptake, with this the first edition of our Q2 review since the scheme took effect midway through last year. 
• Wind conditions were characteristically erratic, as is typical of second quarters generally. This year’s Q2 brought a four-day wind lull that hit South Australia particularly hard — by some measures the worst the region had seen in four years, by others the worst in seven.
• Autumn ran slightly warmer and wetter than average nationally, according to BOM. This was especially true in the south-east of the country — a pattern that likely helped hydro output on the mainland, though Tasmania saw below-average rainfall.
• LGC spot prices have collapsed. This is a trend that started in the second half of 2024 on the back of several policy decisions such as the introduction of the REGO scheme, and the Federal Government shifting focus from the LRET to the Capacity Investment Scheme. A falling LGC price ultimately means ‘negative LGC’ has moved closer to $0.
• The Basslink interconnector experienced a period of changed operations, which has now come to an end with the close of its ‘gap year’. The interconnector was part of an agreement with Hydro Tasmania governing how it operated in the market, which expired on the 1^st of July 2025 — though the interconnector wasn’t reclassified as a regulated asset until 1^st of July 2026. Our own Linton Corbet has separately analysed the asset’s market bids and flow changes across this one-year transition period.
• Ongoing conflict in the Middle East has impacted global oil and gas markets — although this caused some initial movement in futures pricing, our domestic energy markets appear to have remained largely insulated from the volatility (so far).

Region-by-region

In previous editions of this analysis, we’ve focused on the Q2 price trend back to the start of the market to show how second quarters have increasingly become the most volatile time of the year for the market. 

This time around, though, I’ve chosen to focus the analysis on comparing Q2 2026 against the preceding four years instead — as the post-COVID trend feels like the more important story to tell, and it’s the clearest way to see how this last quarter diverged from recent years.

Queensland

Starting with the most northern region, we see below that the time-weighted average price for Q2 2026 in QLD came in at $67/MWh, down 45% on Q2 2025’s $121/MWh — making it the region’s lowest-priced Q2 since 2015, excluding COVID-affected years.

The duration curve below shows how prices in QLD compressed throughout this past quarter: prices spent far less time above $150/MWh than in any of the previous four Q2s, and there wasn’t a single interval above $1,000/MWh during the quarter. Noticeably, however, incidences of negative pricing eased too, down to 8.2%, compared to 12.6% in Q2 2025.

New South Wales

NSW also recorded a large year-on-year fall: the time-weighted average more than halved, down 53% from $161/MWh in Q2 2025 to $75/MWh in Q2 2026.

Like its northern neighbour, NSW saw no prices above $1,000/MWh throughout the quarter — a sharp reversal from 2025 when the region recorded 205 such dispatch intervals, the most of any region that quarter. Both the box plot in the chart above, and the duration curve chart below, demonstrate that the distribution was more compressed. Negative prices also retreated to just 3% of the quarter, compared with 7.4% in 2025.

Victoria 

VIC’s time-weighted average price fell the most of any region, down 59% to $56/MWh from $138/MWh in Q2 2025.

The duration curve for VIC below stands out, with the 2026 line sitting below the prior four years across almost the whole curve. I’ll point out that (unlike QLD and NSW) the 2026 curve stays comparatively flat through the $60 to $10/MWh range before bending sharply upward once it crosses into negative territory. Also unlike QLD and NSW, negative pricing in VIC climbed — to 22.4% of the quarter, up from 13.2% in 2025 and 7.0% in 2024.

South Australia

South Australia’s average for the quarter also fell significantly, down 39% to $86/MWh from $140/MWh in Q2 2025.

This was despite a significant volatility event in SA in late June, when a wind lull, constrained battery capacity, and interconnector limits combined to push prices into market-price-cap territory. Although that event produced a slight rise in the left tail-end of our duration curve below (too small to be visible on the chart), the rest of the curve largely mimics Victoria’s. Negative pricing also climbed in SA, to 21.9% of the quarter (from 17.9% in 2025 and 10.0% in 2024).

Tasmania

Tasmania’s average price decreased 39% to $86/MWh, down from $141/MWh in 2025.

Tasmania’s duration curve for Q2 2026 was a very different shape to every other region’s, with a very sharp rise in incidences of prices between $50/MWh and $100/MWh — prices landed in that range fully 80.1% of the time. The region also had the lowest incidence of negative pricing anywhere in the NEM this quarter — just 0.2% of the time. That’s not uncommon, though: negative prices are relatively rare in TAS at this time of year, with Q2 2025 recording only 0.9% of negatively priced intervals, and Q2 2024 just 1.2%.

Western Australia

To round things out, we’ve also looked at Q2 price trends and duration curves for Western Australia. This data, pulled from our NEMreview software (which includes WEM data from 2017 onward), highlights the clear contrast in pricing patterns — reflecting the WEM’s unique structure and market rules compared to the NEM’s five regions.

Time-weighted average prices in WA climbed to $118/MWh, up 31% on Q2 2025’s $90/MWh — the highest Q2 average in the WEM data we hold, and a sharp contrast to the falls recorded across every NEM region this quarter.

The duration curve below tells a similar story: the 2026 line sits well to the left of every other year charted, confirming prices spent far more time in the $60/MWh to $150/MWh range than in any of the previous four Q2s.

NEM-wide Summary 

Zooming out to the broader trend, time-weighted average prices fell in all five NEM regions this quarter, pulling prices below $90/MWh across the board.

Part of that fall was driven by the absence of high-price events: incidences of prices above $1,000/MWh fell to zero in QLD, NSW and VIC, and close to zero in TAS.

Interestingly, incidences of negative prices rose sharply in VIC and SA compared to previous second quarters, but fell considerably in QLD and NSW, and fell more modestly in TAS.

Key takeaways

Average prices fell in every NEM region by between 39% to 59% compared to Q2 2025, with most regions hitting a low not seen in the post-COVID period.

But averages only partly demonstrate a more important shift in how the distribution of prices is changing. If you flick through the duration curves for each of the five NEM regions again, you’ll notice a steep rise in incidences of prices below $150/MWh, where curves in other recent second quarters showed that same steep rise closer to the $300/MWh mark — this is a reasonably clear sign that price-setting dynamics are shifting.

The trends we’ve seen are not uniform however. Three distinct groupings of price patterns emerged across the NEM in Q2: the northern mainland (QLD and NSW), the southern mainland (VIC and SA), and Tasmania on its own. That split that won’t surprise anyone familiar with interconnector dynamics and each region’s respective fuel mix.

It’s along those same groupings where we see a divergence in negative price patterns too. VIC and SA both saw negative pricing intensify for a third consecutive year — 22.4% and 21.9% of the quarter, respectively — while QLD, NSW and TAS  saw lower negative priced intervals compared to Q2 2025.

Beyond focusing on the analysis of second quarters only, these results reaffirm a broader trend that spot price volatility is generally decreasing across the market (and has been for most of the past twelve months). This broader pattern is something we also noted at the conclusion of this past summer.