Looks like a system wide failure

For years the average wholesale price was somewhere between $30 and $60 per megawatt hour for electricity on the Australian national grid. But for the entire 2,184 hours of quarter two this year, we were paying an average price of $264 per megawatt hour. It wasn’t just due to a couple of freakish spikes, instead it was a relentless burning average, like a lava flow arrived at your wallet.

At an average operational demand of 22GW, that’s a hefty $12.7 billion dollar price tag for 91 days of electricity. Last year the same period it cost $4b. Years ago, before we added all the unreliable generators, it would have cost $2 billion.

It would have been cheaper just to build a whole new power plant last year.

The graph below covers the century so far. It is that bad.

It wasn’t that there was a particular time of the day when prices were higher, instead every hour was a bloodbath. It was a phase change. There was no happy hour at this hotel.

And it didn’t matter whether a state was renewable-heaven or a den of black-coal. Prices were shocking in every […]