Victoria’s 28 November election has become a referendum on the 475km VNI West transmission line, which the Coalition and One Nation have pledged to scrap even though Yallourn’s 2028 exit will leave a 1,482MW hole in the grid. Endgame’s Oliver Nunn is quoted throughout on what the election means for the energy transition, and Endgame modelling finds that cancelling the link would push Victorian prices up by about $20/MWh from 2036.
Days before entering caretaker mode, the Victorian government approved two large wind farms, including Andrew Forrest’s Moreton Hill project, only five months after it applied. On average, wind farm approvals in Victoria have taken 1,096 days over the past five years.
Eku Energy’s 250MW/500MWh battery at Williamsdale, the ACT’s largest, is now online about a year behind schedule, with the ACT government paying $368 million over 15 years in return for half of the net revenue.
About 14,000 kerbside EV chargers will be installed on power poles from 2027 under the federal Accelerating EV Charging Program, but without dedicated parking many could end up blocked by petrol and diesel cars.
Japan’s latest onshore wind auction awarded 329MW at an average FIP price of 11.12 yen/kWh, at or below the estimated LCOE of 12–16 yen/kWh. Developers will likely recoup their costs through PPAs of 15–20 yen/kWh, once non-fossil certificate value (3–4 yen/kWh) is added on top of the FIP price.
Hokkaido has opened a call for about 1GW of data centres across six sites in Ishikari and Tomakomai, two of METI’s Green Transformation (GX) strategy zones, with operations expected from 2030–31. Hokkaido EPCO has signed an agreement with the prefecture, and its TSO has committed to the grid upgrades needed to connect them.
Market, machine and model – what each is telling you when the curve moves.
In our latest article, we compare three views of the NEM forward curve: the traded market, our machine learning forecast and our fundamental capacity expansion model.
Ausgrid’s Wired for Good looks at the shift from reactive to predictive and the future of grid maintenance, as host Sarah Aubrey talks with Ausgrid’s General Manager Strategy Mark Ragusa and CutlerMerz’s Tim Edwards. They discuss how drones, AI and predictive analytics can catch faults earlier, prepare networks for extreme weather and balance reliability with affordability.
Labor’s flagship renewables policy has hit a major setback, with 27 of 109 Capacity Investment Scheme projects pulling out as rising costs, grid connection delays and difficulty securing PPAs take their toll. The withdrawals take 9.5GW out of the scheme’s 40GW total and cast doubt over whether enough new generation will be built before Eraring and Yallourn close.
Amid growing community backlash in inner Sydney and Melbourne, the Albanese government will ban AI data centres from being built near homes and recreational facilities. Draft laws due for consultation before the end of the year will also force new data centres to transition to renewables or risk having their power cut off.
The market operator is warning of “catastrophic” blackout risks as its engineers and analysts take industrial action over pay, including bans on approving planned outages.
Paywalled: Tokyo Gas has dropped plans for a 30MW floating offshore wind project off Fukushima because construction costs keep rising. The project sat outside the government’s offshore wind auctions, and Tokyo Gas will stay in bottom-fixed projects such as the 450MW Round 3 project off Yamagata it is developing with Marubeni and Kansai EPCO.
Zugzwang: Episode 6 – Anatomy of a Trading Department
The latest episode of Zugzwang: The market modelling podcast is now available!
Jack Simpson, Oliver Nunn and Endgame Director David Scott go inside a trading team to see how the physical, contract and risk desks work. They explain why a price spike looks very different to each desk, from the contracts locked in years out to the dispatch decisions made on the day.
Market, machine and model – what each is telling you when the curve moves
A year ago, the New South Wales evening peak swap for Q1 2027 was marked well over $300 per MWh. By September it had more than halved. Queensland has come down a similar path, and most evenings over the year have settled well below where the curve was sitting. On the fundamentals, there is a reasonable case that prices have further to fall.
The curve stabilised over July to August and incrementally traded up in September, but then came the volatility of October, and the front of the curve stepped up. By the 20 October close, the Q1 2027 swap was back above $180.
That is the reality of trading a forward curve. A trend can run for months and reverse in days, and the models most of us use to judge whether that trend is fair don’t reverse with it. Against this backdrop, we ask: when the forward curve, a machine-learning forecast and a fundamental model all disagree, what is the gap telling you?
To answer it, we have put three sources on one chart.
pd4castr is Endgame’s machine-learning price forecast, and Prisma is our fundamental model of the NEM. We have combined these two sources with observable market pricing across the forward curve, provided by TOD Markets.
TOD Markets operates an ASIC-licensed, real-time electronic over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives marketplace for Time-of-Day electricity swaps in the National Electricity Market (NEM), publishing daily closing prices and facilitating two-way markets across a range of regional, quarterly and Time-of-Day contracts. These products enable generators, retailers, battery operators and trading firms to manage electricity price exposure across different periods of the day, complementing traditional flat electricity futures.
TOD Markets brings together major Australian electricity market participants, financial institutions and trading firms, providing observable market pricing across the forward curve.
Chart 1 – Three data sources, one chart
Chart 1 shows the New South Wales evening peak at the 20 October close. There is a lot on it, so by way of explanation:
Left of ‘today’, each coloured line is a quarterly swap’s daily close on TOD Markets. Dots mark the sessions where a trade went through.
Right of ‘today’, the thick bars are the same swaps, held flat across their delivery quarter.
The thin lines are daily prices: AEMO’s settled outcomes to date, then the pd4castr forecast (dark grey) and Prisma (teal).
The dotted lines are the pd4castr forecast averaged over each quarter, so they can be read directly against the swaps.
The whiskers show each model re-run against different years of historical weather.
Chart 1 – In the NSW evening peak, the market sits above the forecast in every quarter
TOD Markets closes and traded swaps, AEMO settled prices, pd4castr and Prisma, NSW evening peak, at the 20 October 2026 close
The first thing that jumps out is that the market sits above the forecast in every quarter the forecast covers. Across all three regions it is the same story for four products in five. The rest of this article is about why.
Chart 2 – The market leaves a trail
TOD Markets prices each part of the day separately: five prices for every quarter, where a conventional swap gives you one. That matters because exposures aren’t flat. A solar farm is long the middle of the day and a retailer is short the evening peak. They are carrying opposite halves of the same quarter, and a single blended price gives neither of them anything to hedge against. The same granularity lets a battery owner trade the midday-to-evening spread directly. TOD Markets also provides this data as a service for businesses that do not trade.
Chart 2 strips everything back to the closes. The curve came down in steps through 2026 as a year of soft spot prices worked its way in. Trades are sparse – fewer than one close in a hundred carried one – so a flat run usually means no news rather than a steady price. A close only moves when someone bids or offers through it.
Chart 2 – NSW evening peak swaps roughly halved over the year, then reversed in October
TOD Markets daily closes by delivery quarter, NSW evening peak, to 20 October 2026; dots mark sessions with a trade
Put another way, a market price is the end of a journey. A model forecast starts afresh every time it runs with different inputs. A forward curve must move from where it last traded, and it carries its history with it: the positions people hold, the losses they have taken, and how nervous they feel about the next one. In October that nervousness came back, and the curve stepped up with it.
So what changed on 1 October? Here we are speculating, but we think the curve simply fell too far. More storage and renewables are on the way, and that is what the downtrend was pricing. The cost of producing energy has not fallen with it. Coal is priced off export parity, and gas earns more on a ship than in a power station. By September, swaps had reached a level where some NSW generators no longer wanted to sell them. It paid better to buy contracts instead, pass the cost of their plant through to the spot market, and lift revenue by bidding higher.
Then, on 1 October, unit outages and changes in contract positions landed together at the turn of the quarter, and ran on into the next one. Add some unseasonably hot weather, and the curve stepped up to meet them. This was not a wobble. It was the market resetting to a new fundamental level.
The charts now show it. NSW evening peaks have settled at around $134 per MWh so far in October, up from $92 in September, with three straight evenings above $200 in the second week. The Q4 swap sat at $137.50 right through those evenings, then re-marked to $175 on 15 October – and stayed there as spot fell back below $100 over the following days. That is what a new level looks like on the screen: the price stops coming back.
The question is whether it persists. Outages end, contract books get rebuilt and storage keeps arriving, and all of that pulls the curve back down. But fuel costs set by export markets are not going away, and a generator that has found it earns more in the spot market than on the screen will be in no hurry to start selling again. We expect the market to spend the next quarter testing which of those forces wins.
Chart 3 – The forecast follows recent behaviour
pd4castr isn’t trained on raw price history in the hope the pattern repeats. It is trained on two years of history, matching what was forecast at the time against the prices that actually settled, and it learns from a small set of explanatory inputs: demand, renewable output and, above all, how much scheduled plant is sitting in reserve. Some of those inputs are calculated from known relationships before the model ever sees them, rather than learned from a handful of examples. Refining those inputs is where we put most of our effort.
Looking forward, demand is built from a single reference year of weather, and plant availability comes from AEMO’s MTPASA, adjusted for the outages generators are likely to take so it matches the eight-day lead time the model was trained on. What comes out is the price you would expect if participants keep bidding as they did over the training period. Bidding behaviour, gas costs and network constraints are not modelled directly. The model only learns about a change like 1 October once the new prices have settled and worked their way into training.
That makes it the best guide we have to the next few quarters while the market behaves as it has – and it means the forecast has followed the spot market down.
The dotted lines on Chart 3 average the forecast over each quarter, and they tell an interesting story. Plant availability is the model’s main input, so it is reading the same Q4 outages through MTPASA. Its average for the rest of Q4 is $134 per MWh – almost exactly what October has settled at so far. Then it drops to $83 in Q1 2027. The forecast agrees that Q4 is different. It just doesn’t think it lasts. The market, holding Q1 2027 above $180, does.
Chart 3 – The forecast lifts for Q4, then falls away in 2027 while the curve holds
AEMO settled prices and pd4castr daily forecast with quarterly averages (dotted), TOD Markets closes and traded swaps, NSW evening peak, at the 20 October 2026 close
We don’t read the gap as the forecast being wrong. The forecast is answering ‘what will this cost if the market behaves as it has?’ The market is answering ‘what will I pay so I don’t have to find out?’ After a year of evening price spikes, the second answer carries a premium – and October has just reminded everyone why.
Chart 4 – The fundamentals show where the system should head
Prisma comes at the problem from the other end. It is a capacity-expansion model: it builds the system from costs and assumptions about plant, fuel, demand and new entry, and calculates the prices that fall out. It has no idea what traded yesterday, and that is its strength. It tells you where prices should head as the system changes, and what any one assumption is worth.
Chart 4 – Prisma sits below the market in most quarters, but above it through the winters of 2027 and 2028
Prisma daily prices, averaged over the same delivery window and hours as each swap, NSW evening peak, at the 20 October 2026 close
Prisma is no permabear – through the winters of 2027 and 2028 it sits above the screen. But in most quarters it sits below it, alongside the forecast. When a model built from costs, Prisma, and a model built from behaviour, pd4castr, both land under the market, the market is pricing something neither of them carries: current fuel costs, outages and how participants are contracted.
Chart 5 – It isn’t the weather
The obvious objection is the weather. Most forecasts assume a single year of weather – 2015 is the usual choice – and perhaps a hotter, stiller year would close the gap. So we re-ran both models against every year of history we have: 45 years for Prisma and 13 for pd4castr. Each whisker on Chart 5 is that range.
Chart 5 – Re-running every weather year does not close the gap to the market
Range of each model across historical weather years; filled dot is the mean, hollow dot is 2015, NSW evening peak
It doesn’t close. Across every region and product we looked at, around half of the traded prices sit outside every weather year that either model can produce. Whatever separates the models from the market, it isn’t the weather.
Two other results surprised us. First, which run you pick matters more than which year: for around one product in five, a single sensitivity switch moves the forecast further than the entire weather range. Second, a single weather year hides its own error. 2015 sits above the long-run average on some contracts and below it on others, with no consistent bias to correct for. Our view is simple: a forecast quoted without its run and its range is a rumour.
Chart 6 – The shape of the day
Chart 6 lines up all three sources by time of day, and it shows the most consistent pattern in the whole exercise. Prisma carves the deepest shape, with a midday trough down towards zero and a sharp evening peak: which is what you would expect from a model that builds dispatch from the plant up. pd4castr smooths much of that shape away. And the market charges most for the evening.
Chart 6 – The market prices the evening peak above both models
TOD Markets closes, Prisma and pd4castr by time-of-day product, NSW, selected quarters, at the 20 October 2026 close
In Q1 2027 the market’s evening peak sits about $100 per MWh above the forecast, and around $50 above Prisma. At midday it sits well above the fundamentals, unwilling to bank the full depth of the solar trough. The market is buying insurance on the evening and declining to bet on the middle of the day.
That is exactly where traders feel the risk, and exactly where TOD Markets’ five prices earn their keep. It is also where both our long-run techniques are weakest. The days that hurt are made in a handful of intervals with binding constraints, unit outages, the exercise of market power. A capacity-expansion model was built to answer what gets built over decades, and a statistical model averages those intervals away.
This is the gap Gambit is being built to close. Gambit is Endgame’s short-run fundamental model, running on a replica of NEMDE, the dispatch engine the market actually uses, so that constraints, unit availability and bidding are represented as dispatch sees them. Rather than lean on Prisma for the near quarters, the intent is to use Gambit to change the inputs that moved the market on 1 October – coal prices, outages, contract positions – and price the next few quarters directly. That gives a quick, adaptive view of plant costs, availability and portfolio positions in the window before a machine-learning model has caught up.
The availability of standardised Time-of-Day forward prices provides an important additional source of market intelligence for Australia’s electricity sector.
Combining TOD Markets‘ observable forward-market prices with Endgame’s fundamental and machine-learning forecasts allows participants to compare actual market pricing with independently modelled expectations.
As renewable generation, battery storage and changing demand patterns increasingly influence electricity prices throughout the day, this combination of transparent market price discovery and independent analytical modelling provides valuable insights for trading, hedging and investment decisions.
Our two cents
Curves move faster than models. NSW and Queensland have come a long way down, and storage will keep pushing in that direction. But the cost of energy has a floor. Coal is priced off export parity, with bids rising to $80/MWh, and gas is the same – exporting it is far more profitable. October showed the front of the curve can step up in days when outages and unseasonably hot weather meet a market that has fallen too far.
The gap between model and market is sentiment, current conditions the models don’t carry including coal and gas availability and price, outages and participant contracting, and where the market is trading from. It is not the weather.
1 October looks like a new fundamental level rather than a blip. The forecast sees Q4 at the new level and lets it go by January; the screen is betting it carries into 2027. Whether it holds depends on outages returning and contract books being rebuilt, against fuel costs that aren’t going anywhere. Watch the trail of closes – it will tell you first.
The money is in the shape of the day. It is where the market charges most for risk, where the models disagree most, and where a single blended price tells you least. We think that is where the next few years of NEM trading will be won and lost.
In Trading Places, the Duke brothers bet everything on a crop report they were certain of, and were cleaned out when the real number came in. Nobody needs a stolen crop report to trade the NEM. They need to know what each of their modelled numbers is and how it was built – and, on the day the curve turns against them, be ready to adapt.
Appendix: sources and caveats
Sources.TOD Markets closes and quotes, 20 October 2026, from live.todmarkets.com.au. pd4castr forecasts from api.v2.pd4castr.com.au, using pinned annual model 20260924.ANNUAL-ALL-REF-YEARS.SENS r1 on the MTPASA overstatement adjusted sensitivity, at weather reference year 2015 for the line and across its 13 weather reference years for the range. Prisma Q3 2026 runs, with the 45-year range drawn from the 1981 to 2025 weather runs. AEMO settled regional prices to 20 October 2026, averaged over the same bucket hours. Prices in AUD per MWh. Bucket hours are NEM time.
Caveats.
Prisma is modelled in real June 2025 dollars and escalated to nominal at 2.5 per cent a year so it shares an axis with the traded curve.
The two weather ranges cover different sets of years and are not like for like.
Whiskers show the full range across weather years, so a single extreme year can set the top.
The evening peak less midday spread is derived rather than separately quoted, so it carries no trade markers.
The pd4castr quarterly average for Q4 2026 covers only the part of the quarter still to run.
Daily values above $420 per MWh are clipped on the charts.
Snowy 2.0’s price tag has blown out to up to $25 billion, another increase from the original $2 billion when it was announced in 2017. With tunnelling only 65% complete, the 2,200 MW pumped hydro project isn’t expected to deliver first power until early 2029.
Alinta Energy has abandoned its $1.8 billion, 900 MW Oven Mountain pumped hydro scheme in northern NSW, citing economic and timing challenges including a critical transmission line. It’s the second largest NSW project scrapped this month, after Origin’s Skye Ridge Wind Farm, as falling battery costs undercut pumped hydro.
WEM news: AEMO has set the 2028-29 Reserve Capacity Prices at $459,192/MW/year for Peak capacity and $244,250/MW/year for Flexible capacity, alongside the assignment of capacity credits for the 2026 Reserve Capacity Cycle.
NextDC expects its future earnings to fall by about a third after West Footscray residents stalled Jemena’s rollout of 15-metre, 66 kV power poles to its Melbourne M3 data centre by parking their cars in the street to block the work trucks. Morningstar expects community pushback like this to drive new data centres further from built-up areas.
A new alliance of Queensland community groups, backed by Nationals leader David Littleproud, is calling for tougher rules on wind and solar developments, including minimum 3 km setbacks from homes and up-front decommissioning bonds. It follows growing frustration among neighbours of projects, such as Stanwell’s Wambo Wind Farm, and adds to planning risk for the Queensland renewables pipeline.
NSW spot prices hit $23,107/MWh on 12 October when a spring heatwave coincided with coal outages. Amber Electric’s roughly 30,000 customers earned about $2 million in two hours by exporting from home batteries during the spike, which raises questions about AEMO’s lack of visibility over behind-the-meter storage.
Paywalled: LNG importers across Asia are pushing back on the federal government’s plan to make exporters reserve gas for the domestic market, putting Australia at odds with the region’s major energy buyers. The outcome will shape east coast gas supply and prices for gas-fired generation.
News from Japan
Paywalled: METI is considering raising the fee for grid connection applications, which hasn’t changed since 2012 (¥220,000, about AUD 2,000), to stop BESS developers from holding grid capacity without firm plans. Applications have jumped from 1,599 in FY2023 to nearly 25,000 in FY2025, and earlier measures like a higher deposit and caps on applications per developer haven’t slowed them.
Podcast of the week
BloombergNEF’s Switched On looks at why gas turbine makers are cashing in on the global power rush. With orders surging, delivery slots scarce and data centres driving demand, they ask how long the boom can last and whether manufacturers can expand without repeating past overcapacity.
NSW is letting gas into its renewables scheme, with ASL consulting on a firming LTESA tender designed specifically to support gas-fired plants, a sharp contrast to the federal Capacity Investment Scheme, which excludes gas.
ASL’s 2026 Firming IIO Report sets a 1,500 MW pathway for new NSW firming capacity by May 2033 to cover the retirement of Bayswater and Vales Point, with projects needing to deliver for at least eight hours and a first tender due in 2027.
Victoria has given final state approval to WestWind Energy’s 1.5 GW Warracknabeal Energy Park, a 219-turbine wind farm with two 300 MW batteries that would be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, though critics warn it depends on transmission lines like VNI West and the Western Renewable Link that are far from built.
The Climate Council warns coal and gas miners are using a Safeguard Mechanism loophole, classing projects as expansions rather than new facilities to avoid stricter best-practice limits, which it estimates will add 4.5 Mt of CO2 a year by 2035.
A new ACCR report argues WA doesn’t need Woodside’s Browse project to avoid a domestic gas shortfall from 2030, since exporters could supply more from existing projects, a claim rejected by Woodside, industry veterans and the Cook Government.
SA Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis has hinted for the first time that SA may miss its 100% net renewables target for 2027, possibly slipping into 2028, after delays to the SA–NSW interconnector stalled new wind investment, though the state’s pipeline is now rebounding to nearly $32.5 billion of projects under construction or approved.
Endgame Analytics’ latest whitepaper puts Byron Bay under the microscope. Using connected vehicle data from Compass IoT, we modelled what an extra 6,000 visiting EVs would mean for peak demand on the local substation.
The case study looks at a peak visitor day, when around 40,000 visitors join the town’s 11,500 residents, and assumes half of all visiting vehicles are electric.
Zugzwang: Episode 5 – Networks, power poles and the EV charging gap
The latest episode of Zugzwang: The market modelling podcast is now available!
Jack Simpson and Oliver Nunn are joined by Endgame Director Martin Chow and Russell Pendlebury, General Manager of Regulation and Policy at Energy Networks Australia, to dig into proposed rule changes that would let networks install curbside EV chargers on ordinary suburban power poles, and what it means for equity, network costs and bills.
The High Court has dismissed MACH Energy’s appeal, keeping its Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion on hold after ruling the NSW planning commission should have considered the emissions from burning the mine’s exported coal overseas.
Wagga Wagga residents have launched a petition against CDC’s proposed $15 billion, 1.4 GW data centre, which is expected to use as much electricity each year as 1 to 1.5 million NSW homes.
Tesla and major energy retailers are fighting a proposed “EV charger tax” that would let grid operators install EV chargers on their power poles and recover the cost from all electricity customers, including people who don’t drive EVs.
Nvidia-backed AI data centre builder Firmus has pulled its $44 billion ASX float, which would have been the biggest since Telstra, after investors balked at its valuation and debt levels.
To tax or not to tax EVs (ABC Business Daily): Carrington Clarke and the e61 Institute’s Amy Tramontozzi explain what surging EV uptake and falling fuel excise revenue mean for the budget and how vehicles on our roads should be taxed.
On 25 August 2025, Real-Time Market (RTM) prices reached the then market price cap of $900/MWh. A polar cold front held Perth to a maximum of 11.4°C, its coldest day in more than 50 years, and heating demand surged. At the same time, heavy cloud cover with sporadic breaks made rooftop solar generation volatile, leaving operational demand forecasts inconsistent and unstable.
The system turned to its usual answer: gas. But pipeline constraints curtailed OCGT output just when it was needed most, and liquid fuel units were brought on to cover the gap (Figure 1). Elevated daytime prices also discouraged Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) from charging, and their state of charge was less than 40% at the start of the ESROD period[1].
Figure 1: Average RTM price ($/MWh) and generation (MW) by technology, 21 to 27 August 2025
Source: Endgame analysis of AEMO WEM market data.
The event showed that the SWIS must withstand weather and fuel supply limits arriving together. Based on the supply conditions during the event, we estimate that gas for power generation was effectively limited to 406 TJ/day.
Repeated days like that, in a system with no coal left may bring system stress. So we asked the question: what happens to the transition if gas is constrained this way in the future?
Our reference case: SWIS Success
Our SWIS Success scenario describes a hopeful transition, supported by timely transmission and wind build-out. Figure 2 shows how generation changes over time. The system starts mostly with thermal plants, with coal supplying 42% of generation in CY 2026. By CY 2031, coal is retired and wind supplies most of the energy, with gas and storage firming. Solar generation slowly grows over time, peaking at 20% of generation in 2050.
Figure 2: Annual generation (GWh) by technology, SWIS Success, CY 2026 to CY 2050
Source: Endgame WEM price projection, Q3 2026.
Gas does a lot of work in this picture. In CY 2031, the first year without coal, gas-powered generation supplies around 36% of the system’s energy. Its share falls to about 20% by CY 2040, but it remains the firming resource.
Squeezing the gas
To test the daily fuel offtake constraint, we ran a Gas squeeze sensitivity on SWIS Success. Everything stays the same except for two changes. Gas available to generators is capped at 406 TJ/day, and plants can switch to liquid fuel if they have the functionality.
Over a year, 406 TJ/day is a lot of gas. The SWIS burns well under half of that for power in a typical year. So the constraint does not bite on annual volume. It bites on certain days, when demand is higher and renewable resources are lower.
The bottom panel in Figure 3 shows how gas generation changes with the added constraint. Values below the line mean less gas generation in Gas Squeeze than in SWIS Success. From CY 2029, gas generation is lower in every year: by roughly 80 to 280 GWh a year through the 2030s and 2040s, and by more than 500 GWh in CY 2050. Most of that energy is replaced by solar and storage shifting across the day. Liquid fuel runs in CY 2026, 2027, 2029 and 2034, but never more than 13 GWh in a year.
Figure 3: Thermal generation (GWh) by technology, SWIS Success and Gas squeeze, and difference from SWIS Success
Source: Endgame WEM price projection, Q3 2026.
Small volumes, real price impact
The squeeze raises average prices across the whole horizon (Figure 4). On constrained days, gas becomes scarce and more expensive resources then set the price more often; liquid fuel is called on in the tightest periods.
Figure 4: Average RTM price ($/MWh), SWIS Success and Gas squeeze, CY 2026 to CY 2050
CY 2029 to CY 2034. The squeeze adds $7 to $10/MWh (7% to 10%) in every year except CY 2030. This is the period when coal is retiring, and gas carries the most firming. Note that in 2030, CIS projects enter as renewable generation increases and prices drop.
CY 2037 onwards. Once new transmission projects enter, the renewable and storage fleet has matured, the increase settles at a persistent $2 to $6/MWh, averaging about $3.40/MWh.
The system copes, but it pays more to do so.
Resilience has a price
When gas is constrained, the system can’t firm renewables as well, and the SWIS has to rely on more expensive generation. Our Gas squeeze sensitivity tests one constraint, based on a real event. It does not yet test a worse renewable drought, a major outage or a more extreme weather event on top of that constraint.
As the SWIS becomes a weather-dependent system, knowing how it performs in bad conditions matters as much as knowing the central case. System planning exercises need more analysis similar to this, especially as the transition occurs.
Want to know more?
Our WEM price projection covers a range of scenarios and sensitivities. Subscribers receive the full report, a briefing, the assumptions and summary workbooks and half-hourly modelling results.
Results are from Endgame’s Q3 2026 WEM price projection (PLEXOS dispatch model). Prices are real, time-weighted average RTM prices in 2026 dollars. CY means Capacity Year: CY 2026 runs from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2027.
The government’s Australian Energy Update 2026 shows Australia’s total energy use fell 5% as electric vehicles, rooftop solar and growing renewable generation replace fossil fuels.
Sydney solar retailer Macarthur Energy has collapsed owing $3.4 million to creditors, leaving customers out of pocket by up to $17,600 for batteries never installed and raising questions about consumer protections under the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program.
Marinus Link has begun its next construction phase with a sod-turning ceremony for the undersea interconnector between North West Tasmania and Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, with the related transmission works due in service by 2030.
News from Japan
Paywalled: Kyushu Electric’s incoming president, Norihiro Nakamura, says the utility is considering building new nuclear capacity, as demand in the region grows from AI data centres and semiconductor hubs such as TSMC’s.
Paywalled: TEPCO is tightening its grid connection rules to stop data centre developers holding queue spots without firm plans; from October 2026, it will cancel requests if the initial construction deposit (10% of estimated costs) isn’t paid within three months, or if development plans change during the application stage.
Victoria will ban datacentres from residential zones and within 150 m of homes, schools and childcare centres, and require them to supply their own renewable energy and storage; critics point out that the rules aren’t retrospective, exempting all approved projects and the eight applications already before the planning minister.
With AEMO forecasting that datacentre electricity use could triple by 2030, the AEMC has opened consultation on two rule changes from Minister Bowen that would make datacentres and other large loads pay their share of the network upgrades they trigger, and stop the cost of stranded assets being passed to other consumers if projects fall through. Submissions close 5 November.
Treasury’s Intergenerational Report 2026 names the energy transition as one of five forces reshaping the economy over the next 40 years, projecting that household energy costs will fall around 40% between 2030 and 2050 as homes electrify, and that data centres will make up almost 10% of NEM demand by 2050.
Woodside and Burrup Peninsula Traditional Owners are locked in a $300 million compensation dispute over the 1998 land access agreement for the North West Shelf’s Karratha Gas Plant – the Ngarluma Yindjibarndi Foundation is seeking $390 million over 12 years against Woodside’s offer of $87 million.
Chris Bowen is travelling to India and Saudi Arabia to bolster fuel security, with plans to visit the world’s largest refinery at Jamnagar and meet Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman about the closure of the East-West pipeline, ahead of COP31.
Sunshine and wind met a record 80.4% of demand on the NEM on Saturday 19th September, with rooftop solar alone supplying more than half the grid’s power for 30 minutes around lunchtime.
Columbia Energy Exchange looks at the Iran war six months on. With crude near $107 a barrel, Hormuz tanker traffic reduced and Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline offline, they warn that the market buffers that cushioned the early shock are running out.
Anthropic has signed a lease for Australia’s largest data centre, the $32 billion Western Downs Digital Park near Dalby in Queensland, which will power Claude AI inference and, once built, draw electricity equivalent to 1.5 million households.
Australia’s dependence on gas generation during the evening peak has fallen by almost 70% in the year to August 2026, with batteries now covering 49% of evening dispatchable power, up from just 0.4% in 2020.
NSW’s renewable transmission delivery agency EnergyCo has underspent its budget by $939 million over the past two years, a symptom of approval delays that now leave the state roughly 7.9GW short of its 2030 renewable energy target.
ARENA has committed $8.2 million to a home electrification trial that aims to make the transition from gas to electricity easier, letting up to 1,000 Canberra households bundle solar, batteries and EVs onto one digital platform.
IEEFA and Green Energy Markets’ Australian Renewable Energy Scorecard finds Australia has enough wind and solar in the pipeline – 34GW of solar and 17GW of wind fully approved – to hit the 82% 2030 renewables target, but actual construction is falling far short.
News from Japan
Chubu Electric Power has withdrawn its restart applications for Hamaoka Units 3 and 4 after an independent committee found staff had for years manipulated seismic safety data submitted to Japan’s nuclear regulator, leaving it unclear if or when the reactors will ever restart.
Podcast of the week
Zugzwang: Episode 3 – What is transmission really worth?
The latest episode of Zugzwang: The market modelling podcast is now available!
Jack Simpson, Oliver Nunn and Jabez Wilson discuss modelling philosophy and put it to work on one of the NEM’s most contested assets: transmission. Listen now on your favourite platform.
