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The BESS-Era Market Shift

Jan 2024 — Jul 2026 · price shape vs storage, solar & wind · NEM + states
NEM
NSW
QLD
VIC
SA
TAS

Since 2024, grid-scale batteries have gone from negligible to price-shaping — charging through the solar-flooded midday and discharging into the evening peak. These views track how the daily price shape, spikes and negative prices are moving as storage and renewables scale.

VRE share of demand
35.70%
vs Jan 2024: ▼ 5.26%
BESS discharge (latest)
0.67%
vs Jan 2024: ▲ 0.15%
Intraday range (latest)
$164
vs Jan 2024: ▼ 545
Negative prices (latest)
2.07%
vs Jan 2024: ▼ 1.07%
Spike share (latest)
0.48%
vs Jan 2024: ▼ 0.64%
Daily shape · how the day is reshaped

Daily BESS Charge / Discharge vs Price

Hourly-average price (line) against BESS charge/discharge bars — storage buying the trough and selling the peak. Pick a year and month below the chart (months without data are greyed out); axes are fixed across all periods so shapes stay comparable.

Period

Daily Price Shape vs Solar

How the daily price shape deepens at midday as solar output grows — the duck curve forming year over year. Full history back to 2018: pick a year and month below the chart and step through the duck actually forming.

Period

Daily Price Shape vs Wind

Price shape against wind output — flatter and less diurnal than solar's signature. Full history back to 2018; pick a year and month below the chart.

Period
Month by month · the shift over time

Renewable Share of Demand

Wind, utility solar and rooftop as a share of regional demand, back to 2018 — the volume driver behind everything below: penetration is why capture ratios decay, negatives multiply and the duck deepens. Per-farm performance behind these totals: Wind · Solar dashboards (rooftop has no farms — it appears only here).

Renewables vs Fossil vs Storage

7-day average MW, back to 2018 — the renewables/fossil crossover is a decade story. Storage is shown separately below as its % of demand rather than sharing the top axis: in raw MW it is genuinely small next to a fossil/renewable stack an order of magnitude larger, so on one shared axis it would sit flat near zero regardless of how fast it is actually growing. % of demand is the scale that shows the real (and revenue-relevant) trend, and it is the same metric the BESS-penetration charts below use.

Available vs Realized Storage Spread

Yellow lines: the TB2/TB4 benchmark — the spread a perfectly timed 2-hour / 4-hour battery could earn from daily price shape, shown back to 2018. Teal: what the region's actual BESS fleet realized (energy-weighted discharge price minus charge price); it starts only once a real fleet exists (months under 5% of recent fleet volume are suppressed as noise). The years of benchmark with no teal line ARE the point: the spread was on offer long before storage arrived to capture it — and watch the yellow lines compress as it does.

Solar & Wind Capture Ratio

Generation-weighted price ÷ time-weighted price. Below the 100% line, a technology earns less than the market average because it produces when everyone else does — solar cannibalisation, quantified monthly. The low solar readings are real: AEMO’s Q3 2025 QED puts NEM grid-scale solar VWAP at $26/MWh against an $87 time-weighted average (≈30%). Shown back to 2018 — the decay from near-parity to today's ratios is the whole cannibalisation arc. Months with under a tenth of typical fleet volume are suppressed as unreliable.

Duck Curve in Dollars — Midday vs Evening

Average price in the solar trough (10:00–16:00) against the evening peak (17:00–21:00), back to 2018. The shaded gap between the lines is the duck deepening — and it is exactly the spread storage gets paid to close.

BESS Penetration vs Average Price

Monthly BESS energy penetration vs average price. Correlation, not causation — but the trend is the story.

BESS Penetration vs Intraday Range

Intraday price range (daily max−min, monthly average) vs BESS penetration — storage compresses the spread it feeds on.

BESS Penetration vs Available TB2 Spread

The saturation question in one frame: the tradeable top-2h/bottom-2h spread (what a battery can actually earn from daily shape) against how much storage is chasing it. Raw range beside it can stay wild on spike days; TB2 is the revenue-relevant series to watch for compression.

Spikes vs BESS Discharge

Monthly spike share back to 2018 against BESS discharge — scarcity was always part of this market; the line joining partway through is batteries showing up where it pays.

Negative Prices vs BESS Charging

Monthly negative-price share back to 2018 against BESS charging — negatives multiplied for years before storage arrived to absorb them; the flat-zero years of the charge line are the before picture.