From JoNova

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 megawatts 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. (A 24-hour average!)

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 electromania.

Even with all the subsidies and the rigging, the Renewables-Wonderland of South Australia was also hit by the exact same price smash as NSW and Victoria. All that wind, solar, synchronous condensers, batteries and renewable smuggery can’t save the state from the 6 o’clock bonfire. This is a message from the future to Victoria and NSW. If South Australia can’t save itself now, how will the big states manage when they turn themselves into South Australia?

All the savings of renewables are illusory.

The wind stopped across the whole continent

The problem was a normal wintery cold blast from Antarctica combined with the collapse of wind generation across the entire east coast “national grid” — reduced to about 400MW out of 13 gigawatts of generators. The whole wind industry in Australia was working at a capacity factor of 3%. Or, as a cruel commentator might say, 97% useless.

Obviously, on a day like this, it doesn’t matter how many twenty billion dollar interstate transmission lines we build, the solution is reliable power plants. That, or stopping those damn high pressure cells.

Over to you Mr Bowen:

Retailers will have hedging contracts to (sort of) cover these price spikes. However the price of future contracts will rise over the coming months. The people who cover the other side of those hedging contracts got burnt today and they will want to recover their costs. Thus events like this flow through to retail prices sooner or later.

Ironically, Paul McArdle of WattClarity notes that wind powered generation set a new record all time high on Monday this week, reaching 9,491 MW. It proves only that any money saved by wind power one day can be vaporized in an instant a few days later.

Batteries are starting to work so hard on the Victorian grid we can even see them on the daily chart (above in spiky pink). If people only knew how pathetically small their contribution is compared to fossil fuels.

And the forecast is looking similar for tomorrow:

Unless something changes, the bonfire begins again 5pm.

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*In Victoria the spike averaged about 7,800W at a price of $9,000 MWh, for a bit over 3 hours — $210 million.