Thanks to the right conditions on the weekend, the whole east coast grid wholesale electricity price fell to zero at the same moment.
It is a small example of what is going to happen in the future. Particularly when storage is added to the mix.
" You don’t get to see this very often – when the spot price of electricity on all the state-based grids in Australia’s main wholesale market hit zero at the very same time.The incident, captured in this screen shot of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s data page by Macquarie Capital’s Brian Morris and posted on his LinkedIn account, occurred at 1.15pm on Sunday.This was when cloudless skies and good breezes – combined with low demand – pushed the share of renewables to more than 43 per cent. At the time of the zero pricing, wind was providing 12.3 per cent of supply in the National Electricity Market, while the combination of rooftop solar and utility-scale solar was providing 22.5 per cent. (Graph at top, courtesy of OpenNem.org). About half an hour earlier, the total output from renewable energy was 9931.64MW , or around 44 per cent – well ahead of total black coal 9014.85MW and nearly three times the output of brown coal 3426.06MW. This looked like a major milestone but in fact is not the first time renewables have nudged out black coal – it did it in April.
