Guest author, Allan O'Neil takes a look at one particular dispatch interval (09:20 on Sunday morning 4th October 2026) to explore an instance of counter-priced flow incorporating the South Australian and neighbouring regions (including via PEC Stage 2).
Anita, Gilles and Lachlan from ERM explain why corporate buyers can't count on abundant renewable supply, as expiring contracts, data centre growth, coal retirements and delivery risks converge on a 2030 contracting cliff in the NEM.
Anita, Gilles and Martin from ERM discuss how coal retirements, the proposed ESEM and new data centre obligations are shifting renewable offtakes beyond energy-only PPAs, rewarding sellers who can package energy, shaping and firming.
Nadali and Adviath from EPEC Group explain how VicGrid's Grid Impact Assessment will decide which non-REZ projects can connect — and present a Victorian BESS case study to argue that a market-informed headroom assessment is a better approach than a handful of PSS/E snapshots.
Belgium-based guest author Gilles Chaspierre looks at two major occasions where the NEM was suspended. In 2016, when physics outran the market; and in 2022 when the market outran the physics. He reads the pair as one lesson about what spot prices cannot see.
In February David Leitch predicted batteries would eat coal volumes, not just price. Here he checks that call against the pipeline: 19 GW and 55 GWh coming, and up to 6 GW of coal displaced.
NEM demand tragic and occasional WattClarity guest author Allan O'Neil drills into an apparent discrepancy in AEMO's demand calculations following the 1 July 2026 transition of the Basslink interconnector from MNSP market participant to Regulated status.
Krishan Pal Birda from Rystad takes a look at winter 2026 gas demand in south-eastern Australia, and explores what it might mean for future years.
Paul Austin explains how utility-scale batteries can use time block derivatives — selling Evening Peak and buying Midday contracts — to lock in intraday spreads and reduce exposure to spot prices, giving a useful baseline for budgeting, investment cases and revenue support scheme bids.
This article from Nadali Mahmoudi and Liam Atkinson from EPEC Group looks at whether the Dinawan–Darlington Point 330kV upgrade, dismissed in 2022, would have delivered greater system strength benefits than what was recognised at the time.
In the final part of this series, David Scott asks whether MPFR and FPP-Reg-FCAS Recovery have delivered on their goals, then uses the data to explore how AEMO might procure Regulation FCAS more dynamically and tune AGC to make better use of it.
In part three of this series, David Scott examines the first year of FPP-Reg-FCAS Recovery settlements, revealing which technologies paid and which were paid, and showing how semi-scheduled wind and solar farms, scheduled generators and batteries have each responded to the new incentives.
In part two of this series, David Scott dives into AEMO's 4-second FPP data to show how dispatch errors are classified as good or bad, how Regulation FCAS usage is measured, and how these calculations translate into FPP payments and Reg-FCAS Recovery charges.
In the first of this four-part series, David Scott explains how loosening frequency control in the NEM led to Mandatory Primary Frequency Response in 2020, and how that problem resurfaced as a settlements issue behind 2025's Frequency Performance Payments and Regulation FCAS reforms.
Guest author Franz David Schaefer digs into the potential "battery correlation penalty" flagged on this site, running a three-year, per-unit analysis of every NEM battery against a perfect-foresight benchmark — finding batteries may be bidding up their own midday charging costs.
Guest author, Allan O'Neil, goes into some detail of exploring the various factors contributing to the price volatility in South Australia that bookended the night of Sunday 21th June into Monday 22nd June 2026.
The reasonable response is not to model the world as simpler than it is, but to confront its variability head-on: to treat stochastic inputs as stochastic, to plan for the distribution rather than its midpoint, and to build the margin of safety that resilience demands.
Guest author (Dr Julian de Hoog) provides some analysis of what has unfolded over the first year of operation of the new Frequency Performance Payments, (FPP) regime - with a particular focus on solar farms.
Bruce Miller talks about why system strength is badly misunderstood. Through analogies using bridges, seeing eye dogs, and bumpy roads, he argues the industry's fixation on fault level and inertia misses the real engineering challenges of the transition — and risks costly, counterproductive fixes.
Dr Adrian Grantham from the AEMO has written this guest-authored post to provide an introduction into the functions of the organisation's Operational Forecasting team, the types of forecasts and other work they deliver, and the internal and external stakeholders they engage with.