How Retailers Use Contracts to Hedge Customers
Guest author, Warwick Forster, provides an explanation of some of the common ways that retailers hedge their risk exposure in the National Electricity Market
Energy Literacy
A collation of articles here pertaining to energy literacy.
Investments in increasing the flexibility of Coal-Fired Power
Some operations at Stanwell Power Station unit 1 in the past couple weeks caught our attention, and are presented as a useful illustration of some concepts related to...
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...
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...
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...
Different approaches for dispatch
Highlighting the different approaches taken to cost/price based dispatch in an interconnected electricity system (or market).
Beginner’s Guide to how dispatch works in the NEM, and hence how prices are set
Walking through 5 (much simplified) "Dispatch Intervals" to illustrate some starting principles of marginal price based dispatch arrangements, such as used in the National Electricity Market
Helping to tame Villain #4 by understanding more about MLFs
Conversations in the week following my post about "Villain #4" (being the deficit in required Energy Literacy) prompted some analysis relating to Marginal Loss Factors
An explainer about electricity demand [take 1]
Following from a steady stream of questions we receive in relation to a range of our products (but in particular with respect to "the RenewEconomy Widget") we've invested...
Power station ‘trips’ are normal, but blackouts are not
Understanding the difference between blackouts, generator trips and intermittent generation and how these events are managed.
Introducing a train analogy to explain Power Systems 101
[PART 1 of] a post by guest author, Bruce Miller - which was initially posted on LinkedIn as one piece, but which has been broken into two on...
What does “Unserved Energy” actually mean – a brief explainer
A brief explainer of what "Unserved Energy" (or USE) actually means, in the context of the AEMO "Electricity Statement of Opportunities 2017" (ESOO) released this week.
[In the NEM, at least] Business consumption of electricity dwarfs residential consumption of electricity
AEMO data for the National Electricity Market shows business consumption of electricity is more than twice that of residential consumption of electricity
Cost Confusion
Our guest author, Allan O'Neil, posts an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of an increasingly popular metric - the LCOE (or Levellised Cost of Energy)
Let’s talk about FCAS
Ancillary Services Matter! No longer just realm of electrical engineer or energy trading boffins, ancillary services (and particularly Frequency Control Ancillary Services or FCAS which will concentrate on...
Forecasting is a Mug’s Game
The three main flaws that put boundaries on the usefulness of all forecasting/modelling
A model’s just a model – it’s not reality (though some models might be useful)
Models are simplifications of reality. Some are more precise than others. Some are useful for different purposes.
What is demand?
Some explanation of the demand measures quoted in WattClarity