energy literacy


Bye X5, Hi X5

From 16th March 2023 the infamous ‘x5 constraint’ has been split into two. We quickly showed previously that the design of the Left Hand Side (LHS) does not vary. In today’s article, valued guest author Allan O’Neil takes a look at what is different.






How does a wind or solar farm make money?

This is the third of a short series of video snippets extracted from the 17th September 2020 presentation by Marcelle Gannon and Jonathon Dyson for the Clean Energy Council entitled ‘Maximising Profitability in the NEM’ for Wind Farms.







More on those negative prices – how do contracts affect bidding behaviour?

Guest author Allan O’Neil provides this handy explainer on how generators’ contract positions affect their bidding decisions and can make negative spot prices pay off, at least in the short term. Very useful for those readers not actively involved in wholesale trading in helping to understand why some conspiracy theories might not match reality.


ConfUSEd by the ESOO? You’re not alone.

I’d rather not add to the number of conspiracy theories in circulation, but I wonder if there’s a conspiracy to make understanding our electricity system in general, and its reliability in particular, as difficult as humanly possible. There’s no doubt…


Price Setting Concepts – an Explainer

Guest author, Allan O’Neil, contributes to our series of articles explaining how prices are set the the NEM (as part of how dispatch works). In this article, Allan explains some of the details in the AEMO’s “Price Setter” file.