Records
Highest and lowest dispatch price and peak operational demand per region, over the loaded window (Jan 2018 – Sep 2026) — not the full history of the market. Every region reaches the regulated market floor repeatedly, so the date shown for it is the first of many, not a singular event.
| Highest price | Lowest price | Peak demand | |
|---|---|---|---|
| QLD | $19,72815 Jan 2026 | −$1,000market floorfirst of 140 · 20 Jan 2018 | 11,159 MW22 Jan 2025 |
| NSW | $20,300first of 6 · 10 Oct 2025 | −$1,000market floor31 Jan 2020 | 13,778 MW31 Jan 2019 |
| VIC | $19,07008 Jul 2026 | −$1,000market floorfirst of 22 · 08 Feb 2018 | 10,784 MW27 Jan 2026 |
| SA | $20,300first of 15 · 18 Jan 2026 | −$1,000market floorfirst of 20 · 02 Feb 2020 | 3,327 MW12 Feb 2025 |
| TAS | $23,20013 Jul 2026 | −$1,00024 Aug 2019 | 1,771 MW05 Jul 2024 |
Price trend
Monthly average dispatch price (RRP) by region, against the shaded range across all five. A line inside the band is moving with the pack; the departures are the interconnector story.
Negative prices
Share of 5-minute intervals that settled below $0/MWh — the daytime oversupply signal driven by rooftop and utility solar.
FCAS prices
NEM-wide monthly average of the ten frequency-control markets, paired raise against lower. The 1-second panel starts late because that market opened after the others.
Demand
Monthly average operational demand by region, on a log scale — regional demand spans an order of magnitude, and a linear axis flattens Tasmania and South Australia into straight lines.
Peak / off-peak spread
Peak block (Mon–Fri 07:00–22:00, the ASX-style contract window; public holidays counted as weekdays) minus off-peak, by month. Solid is the mean — what a peak swap settles against. Dotted is the median. The spread has settled below zero for whole months in SA and VIC since 2022, and this is not a handful of price spikes: clipping every interval at $300 barely moves the line, and the median is usually more negative than the mean, because peak-window spikes pull the mean back toward zero. The peak block has been worth less than off-peak, and by more than the headline number suggests. Part of the reason sits in the window itself: off-peak keeps both the overnight block and the morning ramp, so two of the three things still scarce in this market settle outside the peak block. See the shape-of-day panel below.
Shape of the day
The same prices split by what the day actually does rather than by the contract window: the solar trough, the evening ramp, and overnight. Median price per block per month, so one spike month can't set the axis for everything else. This is why the spread above goes negative — the 15-hour peak block averages the trough together with the ramp, while off-peak is half weekday overnight, now one of the few scarce periods left — including the morning ramp, roughly 05:30–08:00, which the contract window starts too late to catch. The 07:00–22:00 split was drawn for a demand-shaped market: it now includes a midday trough that didn't exist then, and excludes a morning peak that didn't either.
Interconnector balance
Monthly average net interchange per region (AEMO convention: positive = exporting). Watch regions flip from importer to exporter as VRE builds.
Regional price correlation
12-month correlation of 30-minute prices. The colour scale is fitted to the values actually present rather than running from zero, because NEM correlations sit in a narrow high band; the diagonal is blank since a region correlates 1.00 with itself by definition.