Energy update | 17 June 2022

16 Jun 2022

AEMO suspends electricity market 

Earlier this week, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) took the unprecedented step to suspend the entire National Electricity Market (NEM), citing that it had become “impossible to operate’’. This enables AEMO to cap spot prices and direct generators to supply power into the grid. AEMO warned that electricity supply on the east coast of the nation remains finely balanced.

An almost perfect storm of conditions has combined over the past week to throw the NEM into chaos. A large amount of east coast power capacity is currently offline due to planned maintenance of generation units and transmission assets. In addition, a further 3000 megawatts (MW) is offline due to unplanned outages at coal-fired power generators. This is coupled with the early onset of winter with periods of low wind and solar output and also causing a spike in demand for electricity and gas.

AEMO will be monitoring the situation closely. Conditions are expected to remain tight in the coming days, particularly in NSW. It expects the market will return to its normal state once the generators are able to be put back on-line, but this may take weeks.







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