AGL versus Origin: two gentailer strategies compared
Origin Energy’s market capitalisation sits comfortably past $15 billion. AGL’s has spent most of the past two years struggling to hold above $10 billion. That gap is the whole story, if you’re in a hurry. It tells you which of the country’s two big listed gentailers the market thinks has the better balance sheet under […]
Why wholesale electricity prices swing so violently
South Australia’s spot price sat at the market price cap for a chunk of a hot Tuesday afternoon last month, then dropped below zero before most people had switched the oven on for dinner. Same grid, same day, same set of generators. A swing of roughly $18,000 a megawatt-hour inside twelve hours. Nobody at AEMO […]
Rooftop solar grid stability: the honest read
Twenty-four gigawatts. That’s roughly where Australia’s rooftop solar fleet sits now, spread across more than four million homes and small businesses, according to the Clean Energy Regulator’s small-scale scheme data. It is bigger than the entire coal fleet still running in the NEM. And on a mild, sunny Sunday in South Australia, it can supply […]
The Safeguard Mechanism: who’s really carrying the cost
215 facilities. That’s the current population of the Safeguard Mechanism, the scheme that’s supposed to be the sharp end of Australia’s industrial decarbonisation. Steelworks, cement kilns, LNG trains, alumina refineries, coal mines with big fugitive emissions. Between them they account for something like a third of the country’s total emissions, and the mechanism is meant […]
Has the Australian gas industry been written off too early?
Santos paid a dividend again this year off Cooper Basin and Moomba gas that most of the transition commentary insists is a stranded asset waiting to happen. Origin and AGL are still burning gas peakers at a profit on cold mornings and hot nights when the wind drops out. And AEMO’s own Gas Statement of […]
The Default Market Offer and your power bill, explained
1 July. That’s the date the Default Market Offer resets every year, whether anyone notices or not. Most households don’t. They see a line on their bill, assume someone in Canberra or Sydney is keeping electricity prices honest, and move on with their week. The fair read is messier than that, and it’s worth fifteen […]
How the Capacity Investment Scheme actually works
32 gigawatts. That’s the number the Commonwealth put on the table when it expanded the Capacity Investment Scheme, split roughly between 23GW of variable renewables and 9GW of dispatchable capacity, all meant to land by 2030. It is, by a distance, the largest single intervention in the National Electricity Market since privatisation, and it doesn’t […]
Zen Energy Australia: the retailer standing in Whyalla’s shadow
Two numbers to start. Zero: the count of turbines, cells or transformers actually energised at Zen Energy’s flagship Templers battery site in South Australia’s mid-north, more than four years after the project first cleared planning. And somewhere north of a thousand: the number of jobs at a steelworks 400 kilometres away that the South Australian […]
Are big batteries being built for the wrong job?
Two hours. That’s the average discharge duration of most big batteries now under construction or contracted across the National Electricity Market, and it’s the number nobody spruiking the battery boom wants to sit with for very long. Follow the funding on any of these projects and you find developers chasing frequency control ancillary services and […]
Is Australia closing coal faster than it can replace it?
Eraring was supposed to be gone by now. The biggest power station in the National Electricity Market, 2,880 megawatts of black coal on the shore of Lake Macquarie, was pencilled in for closure by AGL back in 2022 for 2025. It didn’t happen. The exit date has already been pushed once, and the NSW government […]