Tag: Energy Market Evolution

Pondering the future of Australia’s electricity market through detailed analysis

Our CEO, Paul McArdle recently penned an article on WattClarity pondering whether the remarkable price results from Q2 were a short lived excursion or whether they are the begging of a more systematic change in pricing patterns. Paul’s article caught the attention of several journalists including Ben Potter from the Australian Financial Review, who referenced the analysis in his piece ‘COAG out of action as electricity prices soar‘, and sought comments from Paul on the topic:

Average wholesale electricity prices across the National Electricity Market shot up to $65-$80 a megawatt hour in the mainland NEM states in the June quarter, and to $120 in Tasmania, Paul McArdle, director of GlobalRoam, said.

Journalist asks for insight about “free energy”

The electricity supply industry is currently the subject of much conjecture about how the future might unfold.

One such scenario involves the possibility that the cost of solar and storage will continue past patterns of decline to the point where the cost of each becomes negligible.  Software industry veteran Mike Cannon Brooks commented on this recently, so our CEO Paul McArdle was contacted for insights (due to our positioning at the intersection of energy and Information Technology) about the plausibility of this scenario – leading to the article “Completely Free Energy a hard swallow for captains of industry” in the Financial Review on 18th March 2016:

Copy of article from the AFR on 18th March

 

Further thoughts will be posted at a later date at WattClarity®, our industry commentary site.

What role might Demand Response play in a (possible) future grid featuring high levels of intermittency?

Last week Paul McArdle posted this article to WattClarity after speaking at All-Energy in early October. His presentation (with narration included) from the conference is available here:

This animation was prepared using our ez2view detailed market dashboard for the NEM and helps to identify some of the variety of factors that can generally be seen to interact to produce spot price volatility.

Following on from the significant piece of analysis we performed about the nature of volatility in the energy market (separately noted on WattClarity® in articles such as this one) we were tasked with speaking at All Energy in October 2013 to help our audience understand how renewable energy might integrate into the broader energy market in future years.

As part of this presentation, we provided this animated walk-through of one particular day in the Queensland region of the National Electricity Market (20th December 2012) which saw instances of price volatility:

This animation was prepared using our ez2view detailed market dashboard for the NEM and helps to identify some of the variety of factors that can generally be seen to interact to produce spot price volatility.