https://anero.id/energy/2026/june/21
By Jo Nova
The high pressure cell that burned the electricity bill
Wind power suffered a crippling failure in South Australia. It was providing 2 Gigawatts, or 100% of the state’s power on Friday June 19th, but by Sunday, the High had arrived and wind generation had collapsed to 0%. Worse, it stayed near there for the next three days.
The big beautiful batteries failed on the first day and prices took off accordingly. Only half the batteries were still there in the first big price spike of the first day, but on Sunday night and Monday morning, when prices hit $20,000 per megawatt-hour, they had nothing left to offer.
Paul McArdle calculates that the four day wind drought in South Australia was the worst since at least 2019. We might wonder if there were worse ones in the naughies or the 1990s, but back then no one gave a toss. There were no price spikes on windless days when the nation ran on coal power.
https://anero.id/energy/2026/june
Staff at RenewEconomy got excited on the first day of the wind drought, talking about how the batteries ran out by the early evening and the prices spiked after that. Apparently this meant that the state needed even more batteries, and urgently! But after the wind drought went on for another three days, they didn’t say a thing. It turns out the state needs five or ten times as many batteries as it has, and bezillions of dollars.
Big batteries caught short as worst wind drought in two years sends prices through the roof
By Sophie Vorrath, RenewEconomy, Monday June 22, 2026
Australia’s main grid chalked up its worst one-day wind drought in more than two years over the weekend, causing a series of price spikes in South Australia and highlighting the urgent need for more battery storage in the state with the highest penetration of renewables.
“The volatility didn’t stop there. Elevated prices persisted overnight, and this morning delivered another period of $20,000 [per megawatt-hour] prices in SA.”
As OptiGrid explains it, many of the state’s batteries discharged heavily through Sunday afternoon and early evening and, as batteries across the state ran low on charge, several dispatch intervals cleared above $3,000/MWh, with prices peaking above $20,000/MWh.
“Around half managed to catch the first extreme price interval,” says OptiGrid, “but far fewer were able to discharge in the later spikes. A couple of batteries were even charging through dispatch intervals above $10,000/MWh.
“By [Monday] morning, many batteries still had limited energy available after the overnight price event. Despite another period of $20k prices, relatively little battery capacity was able to respond.”
Renewables fans still don’t understand the free market (by definition, almost).
“Obviously, no wind meant gas generators had a field day,” David Leitch writes in his own LinkedIn post on the pricing event. “I guess they needed it. There have been so many posts about the decline in gas generation.
Gas wouldn’t be having a field day if there were enough gas generators to compete with, would they?
The problem is any grid dominated by random generators is either going to have to have huge generation oversupply to cover the worst days of the year, or they’re going to have huge price spikes. If they have a huge oversupply and those generators can only earn money on a few days a year, they’re going to have to charge like a Space X IPO on the days they’re needed. There is no way out of this. Intermittent generators are never going to cheaper or better unless we decide blackouts are OK.
“Batteries in South Australia are paying $250/MWh to recharge and on this day ultimately did little to keep prices down.”
So on the first whole day of the wind drought the batteries were already flat, and had to pay $250/ MWh to recharge.
Even after the bonfire on Sunday Monday, things were not looking all that healthy on Wednesday and Thursday either. That’s a lot of red price spikes in the $300 – $500/MWh zone hour after hour.
AEMO Despatch June 25 https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem
Looking at the average daily prices in South Australia, the state was already in deep trouble on Saturday the 20th. Prices for the entire 24 hour period averaged $469/ MWh. On Sunday they blistered in at $1,165 per megawatt all day long.
Paul McArdle at WattClarity looks closely at the bidding behaviour wonders if the “goose was already cooked” by lunchtime Sunday.
“One cannot live on batteries alone.”
I’m 97% sure that is in the bible or some other well known book.
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As a Texan, I don’t know all the regs about feeding into your grid. But I keep thinking (as an old greedy Capitalist) about buying some batteries, charging them up and waiting until another big shortage, and feeding in their electricity into the grid for a large profit.
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I think our domestic battery deals are that if feeding into the grid you get a fixed piddly rate of cents per kWh, regardless of the spot price for generators. It’s tied to your consumer contract with a retailer.
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Amber Electric, if you choose them, puts you in the wholesale market with your batteries.
Those who did so choose would have been earning $20/kWhr, during those maximum price spikes. They can easily *make* several thousand dollars per year with Amber.
If my batteries were controllable by the Amber app, I would be using them.
The “three for free” rort lets me fully charge for free, and get some token feed in 5-9pm, not quite enough to zero my bills, though.
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So if I connected my batteries through Amber, and then run my 4kva generator connected to my batteries I could then sell my battery power through Amber and make $80 per hour for the whole time the grid is in trouble? Might buy a few more or bigger generators!
20
I read somewhere – don’t recall which country it concerned – that criminal gangs are filling sheds with diesel generators and are selling power into the grid during price spikes.
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Spain had a go at that a few years back.
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Sounds like a smart business move to me in the same way that there were some solar panels in Spain that worked 24/7.
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This is utter madness. If SA didn’t have a Connector to Sicktoria then they would be in even more strife.
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And Sicktoria at the moment, 0620 hrs, is also in a wind drought,
producing a whopping 20 MWhrs of power from their mighty wind turbines.
Oh, how the “mighty” fail.
And there’s nothing quite like failing BIG when you do fail.
This is not a “one off” happening either.
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Just need more windmills and batteries, to provide more nothing.
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There must be a local pidgin word equivalent to dunkelflaute, something like
‘webloodybuggeredthatoneupbrother’ or
‘keepdigging-keepdigging-keepdigging’.
Rainbows and pots of gold by the megawatt!
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That reneweconomy sure know how to polish a t**d.
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Shameless shills.
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Island South Australia, and let them learn the hard way. You can’t fix stupid without pain.
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Talk about batteries is so frustrating as Bill Gates said in a two minute rant!
https://youtu.be/VjgDvG13Hgs
They are so pathetically small compared with the demand for power in the grid.
The fundamental problem is that wind and solar capacity ain’t real capacity because its not there during severe nocturnal wind droughts.
We have to keep reminding people ad nauseum that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, like the low point of a dam, a fence or a flood levee and windless nights are the weak link in the RE chain.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-aint-capacity
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And also, overcast days.
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STORM DEFEATS WIND, SOLAR & BATTERIES IN TEXAS STORM JAN 2026
Winter storms in the US have demonstrated the pathetic performance of wind, solar, and batteries.
A severe storm in Texas in 2021 almost blacked out the entire state. Gas, wind, and solar all struggled and Renewable Energy lobbyists effectively deflected criticism by pointing the finger at gas.
This year, Texas rode through another severe storm on the back of gas, coal, and nuclear power while wind, solar, and batteries failed.
This is a day-by-day account of the ‘natural experiment’ in Texas.
https://kclapp.substack.com/p/the-texas-freeze-an-early-update
THAT DEMONSTRATES THAT THERE WILL BE NO TRANSITION TO WIND, SOLAR AND BATTERIES!
IGNORING WIND DROUGHTS HAS ENABLED WESTERN NATIONS TO WASTE TRILLIONS TO GET MORE EXPENSIVE AND LESS RELIABLE POWER, WITH CATOSTROPHIC ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION.
BECAUSE WIND AND SOLAR CAPACITY AIN’T REAL CAPACITY!
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Small dose of history. In the 1950s our farm depended on windmills to pump water for the dairy and to water the cattle. I can recall my father taking a slide nearly a mile to the river to fetch water when our tanks ran dry because the windmills had no wind. Sometimes the wind died for weeks at a time. Very localised, I agree, but indicative of the unreliability of wind. We then bought a pump jack that could be powered by the tractor. Tractors were only just becoming available at the time.
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What you father should have done is to install 2 very large tanks, with enough water to fill one.
Then, when the windmills didn’t work, he could run the water from one tank to the other.
Call it SNOWY 2.
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You win the cocoanut! Best laugh I’ve had in ages. Now I might start weeping as realisation sets in.
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Southern Cross Engineering built tens of thousands of simple petrol powered windmill pump jacks to keep water pumping when the wind died.
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Given all the (rigged mis-information) celebration from Canberra about how they are a totally green energy powered state I took to AI to see how they were affected and discovered that apparently the SA windless event (trashed) or any price spike for that matter is their treasure.
ACT have a “Contract for Difference” (CfD) arrangement for their power supply:
[AI] The ACT Government holds fixed-price contracts (strike prices) with specific large-scale wind and solar farms, secured through competitive “reverse auctions.”
The Mechanism: Generators sell their electricity into the National Electricity Market (NEM) at the prevailing wholesale spot price.
The Settlement: The ACT distributor, Evoenergy, calculates the difference between the generator’s actual wholesale revenue and the agreed “strike price.”
Top-Up: If the wholesale price is lower than the strike price, ACT customers pay the difference to the generator.
Refund: If the wholesale price is higher than the strike price, the generator refunds the excess to ACT customers. [AI]
The top-up appears as a surcharge item on the consumers bill whereas the refund appears as a credit – unlike the (household reduction) one the government promised us this one does come through.
Other states have similar arrangements however any refund arrangement directs the $$$ into state government consolidated revenue (Vic) or reinvested into the energy system or state budget (NSW).
The cherry on top for ACT is that their CfD’s have generally been struck for 10-20 years with 4-9years remaining (Vic/SA projects) or 8-12years (NSW projects).
Sorry if I’m preaching to the converted but wasn’t aware of all the background money movements so sharing for those (like me) still trying to comprehend the monster (rort) that is cheap power…
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This is the yo-yoing of wind renewable energy. Because next week(Mon-> Fri) it will be windy again in SE Australia. Wind, unlike rain is quite easy to predict out to probably 10 days with good accuracy.
What needs to change is the bid times , which are presently set to 5 minute intervals I believe. If it was changed to eg 3 hour blocks in advance, renewables would be totally uneconomical.
But, that won’t happen because Australia is the stupid country. Apparently for the Brisbane Olympics there is a proposal to use the Fitzroy River in Rockhampton for the Rowing events. One problem, maybe only a minor one, the river is a saltwater crocodile habitat.
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…since performance enhancing thangs are banned in the Olympics I suspect this source will be suitably addressed lol.
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They are looking to get a lot of new world records. You see, when a group of animals crosses a river, the crocs don’t take the front ones, they look for weaklings at the back. No-one will want to be finishing last on the Fitzroy river.
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Yeah yeah, that’s the meme. But in July, crocs are torpid. They also generally stay close to the banks. In 160 years of rowing regattas there have been no croc incidents in Rockhampton, even before 1970 when the barrage was built.
There are no modern official records of fatal or non-fatal crocodile attacks on humans in Rockhampton. The only documented attack in the local area dates back to 1867 at Crocodile Creek (near Gavial Creek). (Straight from Google so it must be right.)
Don’t just bag rowing in Rocky. Cancel the whole 1932 games- a complete waste of money better spent on hospitals, schools, roads, and housing.
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I live in this region, and am well aware that crocs do inhabit areas even further south of here.
Rowing events, even to the level of state championship at least, have been held on the lagoon area which has been proposed for the Olympic events. My understanding is that the lagoon is not always connected to the Fitzroy (usually flood times only), but even so, crocs do travel overland.
Apparently, nobody has so much as sighted a croc there during previous events.
That’s not to say that a surprise might not happen, of course!
Record times may well be on the cards. 🙂
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I have been a rowing coach for 20 years. It mystifies me why for Brisbane you don’t just use the Penrith course in Sydney. Used for 2000 Sydney Olympic events and still world class. Maybe spend a couple of $m to tart it up and away you go. Who cares if it’s not Queensland? We’re still the stupid country.
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You are not from QLD, are you?
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If wind only generates on average for about 24% of every year and solar about 15% of every year, that leaves a lot of wriggle room for famines and feasts every 12 months.
I’m using Wiki numbers for the Aussie capacity factors and big batteries would be a toxic, unreliable, super expensive sick joke over a period of 12 months.
IOW we must install TWO SYSTEMS to have enough reliable energy every year.
The cost is unbelievable, SO WHY NOT INSTALL JUST BASE-LOAD SYSTEMS AND FORGET ABOUT THE TOXIC, SUPER EXPENSIVE, UNRELIABLE W & S LUNACY?
And we’ll save thousands of Koalas’ + other wildlife and also thousands of Klms of our environments and farms.
What’s the problem for our clueless pollies, so called scientists, or the MSM etc?
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Why not install just base load?
Because that would make sense, but not make bank for the shysters who are putting in the ruinables and bribing, sorry, lobbying and donating, to the political asses in the the various Parliaments around the country.
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That solar figure leaves me scratching my head.
Can you elaborate?
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Some possibilities
Night
Lunch time power, rolls of rapidly at shoulders
Cloudy days
Averaging (QLD and TAS)
Sub optimal installation (if they are using nominal panel output values)
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Again, here Andrew Bolt asked Aidan Morrison to try and educate us about B O Bowen’s expensive, so called renewables disasters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wov_VzS9nDI
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I’m still looking forward to my $275 reduction as, in SA, my usage prices have dropped but the supply charge has gone from 92,84c/day to 144.0406c/day?
This is an automatic $187 annual increase to my power bill so BOB will owe me $462 when the ‘cheap’ ruinables get their act together
Feed-in – still 2c/kWh
Off-peak – down from 28.182 to 26.0403 per kWh
Peak – down from 47.718 to 44.9768 per kWh
Shoulder – down from 23.54 to 13.6334 per kWh
This is a pensioner rate from Origin that is supposedly 20% below the grubermints reference price
No doubt BOBowen will see this as confirming his mantra of ‘renewables are the cheapest form of energy’ (when it is available)
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So about 2c/kWh down on energy and 51c/day up on service cost. So if you use more than 25kWh per day, you will be ahead of last year but go back a decade or two and you are a long way behind.
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I was gobsmacked at the hike in my daily supply charges.
How much is this going to cost me! Grrrr!
So using my last bill I checked whether I was worse/better off.
The result for me was that I would be paying ONE dollar more under the new pricing scheme for my electrickery use over that same period.
Other people may be worse off/better off.
Best to do a comparison though.
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269.4934 cents per day from Origin in NSW. Up from 193.0170 cents per day
They’re thieves. And, Albanese is a liar.
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Given South Australia’s German heritage, can you legitimately deploy “Dunkelflaute”?
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The AEMO dashboard is remiss in not showing battery charging as a line item. The discharge shows as “generation” but the inverse does not show as demand.
Technically they are correct, I guess, but we remain uninformed.
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Just use this site : https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=30d&interval=1d&view=discrete-time&group=Simplified
AEMO, in my opinion has deliberately reduced the useful information on their site to hide the deficiencies of the renewable push, they now display a completely different format for the WA grid info.
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Yep – wind takes annual leave in Australia. Usually in June when sun is already sick.
Wind firmed by batteries is a lot more expensive than solar firmed by batteries. And the latter is 30 times more expensive than Latrobe Valley lignite fired generators.
It is at least a decade before there will be a new lignite fired generator in Victoria. Until then, the only way to get lower cost electricity is to make your own.
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Rick you stated……
“Wind firmed by batteries is a lot more expensive than solar firmed by batteries. And the latter is 30 times more expensive than Latrobe Valley lignite fired generators”.
”
It is at least a decade before there will be a new lignite fired generator in Victoria. Until then, the only way to get lower cost electricity is to make your own”.
But even their ABC and Greenpeace claim Australia will need 600% more energy by 2040 to supply new AI data centers. See my link below, so something doesn’t add up?
IOW we’ll be caught very short if we don’t wake up soon.
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Easy fixed.
The Greens will force Labor to ban data centres.
Or require them to produce their own electricity plus a percentage for the grid.
Social licence you know.
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It’s a Wo-o-o-r !!!
The time of discussing.good and bad steps of each side, with a nice glass or a cup of.., is over, you must take side if you are a person.
It seems that Karl Stefanovic chose his side.
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There’s real irony in this wind generation failure. People believed something from ….. ‘The First Fleet’. Those ships sailed from Cape Town in October 1787, and ‘roared’ across that Ocean pushed by those prevailing winds between 40 and 50 degrees South, the winds known as the Roaring Forties.
So, with that firmly in mind, they built (out) wind plants on land closest to that area, in the South East of South Australia and in Central Western Victoria. Across the whole of (the AEMO covered) Australia, there are 91 of those Industrial Wind Plants, and in that one area alone there are 61 of them with a Nameplate of 8138MW, and that’s 61% of the total Australian Nameplate for wind generation, almost two thirds of it all.
At 7AM on Monday morning after stumbling along just above zero for almost 12 hours, the total generation from those 61 wind plants in that area was 48MW. (at a Capacity Factor of 0.6%, so less than one percent)
It’s not isolated either, happening usually around once a week. They’ve found a really neat way to cover it up, by implementing that wonderful new thing ….. curtailment, but sometimes, like here, as Joanne has shown, those huge High Pressure weather systems are blocked, and linger longer, hence the outright failure of wind generation.
I have an opinion that the blind pursuit of money latched onto those Roaring Forties, rather than actually looking long term at those actual Synoptic Charts on a daily basis spread over a long time, realising that the total lack of Isobars under those High Pressure weather systems meant zero wind, and zero power generation because of that.
There’s a point to this really.
If anything, anything at all, performed as poorly as wind generation does, it would be laughed out of existence. I mean picture this ….. a salesman selling a product, anything at all, tells you that it’s only going to work as designed a little less than one third of the time, huh! would you buy it?
There’s where we’ve been sorely let down. No one explains to the general populace that wind generation doesn’t perform anywhere even remotely close to the power plants they’re SUPPOSED to replace.
And, with so much free money literally thrown at them, they went and believed something from the 18th Century, rather than look at actual weather maps from, well, as recently as yesterday, or ….. hey, what’s coming tomorrow, next week? Can we look at this time last year, every past year to get some sort of idea what might be coming.
No!! Another snake oil salesman comes along and says ….. I have some batteries for you that will cover those power loss times for you, and hey, no one will ever even suspect those power losses even happen.
And the AEMO. Well, the real engineers there just ring up the hydro plants, the gas plants, the coal fired plants and tell them ….. hey mate, the floor’s fallen out of wind generation, we’re going to need you to bring some Units on line to cover their losses.
And yet again, NO ONE even knows wind has failed yet again, so miserably.
Tony.
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Would you fly an aircraft whose engines were known to stop even 10% of the time? There is no recognition of the requirement for 100% guaranteed performance in most energy applications.
Stop lights, elevators, brakes, steering, railway crossings, pacemakers and absolute limits to time out in foundries, freezers, public transport. It’s endless.
Replaceable energy is generally not fit for purpose. And what’s the bet if they ever finish Snowy II and it actually works, which is unlikely, that coal energy will be required to pump the water uphill and wasting half the electricity because the electrons are not green.
It’s not that any of this is new or difficult to understand, but there are thousands of people on big salaries to pretend wind and solar will replace coal, gas, diesel, kerosense. To not put too fine a point on it, they are lying through their teeth. For money.
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And the other big lie is the ‘grid’. Utterly unnecessary and costing another $1million million. Just to get the Roaring forties to Queensland or Snow II to South Australia or Tasmania. We don’t need it today, so why would we need this ‘grid’ tomorrow? Does no one in this entire farce actually cost justify anything anymore? If we needed a grid it’s for water from the tropics to dry Australia, not electricity.
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It’s Friday. Here in South Australia there has been no wind since Sunday.
Frosts & fogs each morning.
Zero wind power !
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It has a lot to do with large blocking high pressure, which is too far south for this time of year.
This has been happening for years and we need a politician to explain that there has been no due diligence applied to wind farms in relation to an out of sync subtropical ridge. It seems they had no idea that the climate is changing.
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Efficient energy,from Promethean gift of fire to steam and electric power,
has ever been the basis of successful civilisations
20
There is considerable competition to see how much pain a fully developed country can take to preserve
a myth flogged by a conflagration of crooks masquerading as a government. Aus, much of Western Europe,
NY and California are among the competitors. It is interesting in the states that the people voting with
their feet via state-to-state migration are helping keep the scoundrels in power. The cost of living differences
are compelling, the constriction of life via over-regulation differences more so. But even in our bluest states,
there is a lot of life left in the private economy, and a Federal state dynamic that can stop a California train
to nowhere from becoming a Snowy II. What the world press is suppressing is that there is a country where the grid has failed
utterly: Cuba. It’s awful. The only reason it won’t be an epochal catastrophe is that there is no winter in Cuba, but
much of the country has devolved to third world status and the island cannot feed itself despite fertile land and
a long history of cattle industry, nor can it produce anything for export, sugar cane having been the main crop.
But Cuba has been stumbling for a while; the next state or province may fall from full first world status to the
quality of life in a war zone based on self inflicted wounds to the energy grid to the tipping point, followed
by an event that does the tipping. ANd what will other countries say? “It can’t happen here…..”
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There were many that started the race early, ie, Venezuela , Argentina, Cuba, Zimbabwe, all showed Socialism is a total failed concept, yet here we are with many 1st world countries or states all vying for 1st place in the race to the bottom.
Thankfully, Argentina has escaped the grip of communism while South Africa is the best current example of decline under socialist rule.
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Big surprise NOT, even Greenpeace and their ABC are telling us that Australian energy demand will soon increase by over 600%, because of the new AI data centers in every state.
So we can definitely say that we must quickly build many more BASE-LOAD plants across Australia ASAP.
If we don’t we will have no energy security and definitely no NATIONAL SECURITY. When will they WAKE UP and THINK?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/ai-data-centres-pressuring-energy-transition-greenpeace-says/106722390
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Great plan that was to shut down and then demolish coal fired power stations in SA so that a future State government could not reopen them.
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Here’s an idea.
Why don’t we use proven dispatchable power sources of coal, gas, nuclear and real hydro (not SH2) which are inexpensive, well-proven and available 24/7 and which Australia has in abundance, except hydro (but many sites haven’t been exploited).
Why are we using pre-industrial technologies like wind?
Why are semi-literate, semi-numerate and low IQ politicians allowed to make engineering decisions?
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Eight Hydro Electric Power Stations
https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/generation/the-snowy-scheme/
Snowy 2.0 Project using existing dams
https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/
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I don’t understand your point, Dennis.
The original Snowy Hydro Scheme is fine.
Are you suggesting there’s something good about SH2?
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David I was showing the details not passing judgement, I am not qualified for that.
There appears to be a range of views and opinions and for example;
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-03/billions-over-budget-years-late-how-snowy-hydro-2-got-here/106706518
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How foolish are they? They build a power generation system to control the weather, yet the system to control the weather is, itself controlled by the weather. There must be a name for this paradox.
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There is indeed a name.
It’s called “the paradox of control” or “closed causal loop”.
Gulag AI says:
Remind me again why politicians are allowed to make engineering decisions.
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There is – climate politics
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Battery news from the USA.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/us-sees-record-q1-2026-energy-storage-installations
00
Adelaide- just the place
For a submarine base
We will use their reactor
As a contributing factor
Or disappear without trace.
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Perhaps we can leave one of the new secondhand Virginia Class subs moored nearby and running to provide electricity to keep the lights on and the welders welding, because their dodgy power grid isn’t going to cut it.
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Obviously we need more wind. As one of the symptoms of climate change is more wind, we need more climate change. Hence we need to burn more coal.
Just saying …
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Ban the weather?
11