By Jo Nova

That was a hellfire price spike yesterday. It’s not so much the height, but the width of the spike is shocking. Prices lifted off in NSW at 4:45pm and didn’t come back down til 9pm. That’s a four hour nightmare at around $10,000 per MWh. I rarely, if ever, have seen so much area under the red line — so many dollars flowing under the bridge.

“We could have bought a whole new gas plant instead”

Hypothetically, there was around 11,000 watts of demand at $10,000 a megawatt hour for over 4 long hours which is a $450 million “price signal” (and that’s just NSW). In Victoria a similar spike consumed another $200 million*. The market — sick, injured and rigged, it seems, is beating us over the head. The average price for the whole 24 hour period in NSW, Victoria and South Australia was a red hot $2,000 per MWh.

This is not a free market, it’s a fixed market — designed to change the global climate and maybe also keep the lights on. A free market would fix itself, but the government banned the good options, so all we’re left with is outbreaks of […]

via JoNova

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June 26, 2025 at 03:46PM