Regional Outlook — NSW1: Friday 22 May 2026
The NSW spot price sits at $56.07/MWh as of 06:30 AEST, with total demand at 6,973 MW — a Saturday morning low well below last night's evening peak, which ran from $125–$200/MWh between roughly 07:30 and 09:00 AEST on Friday. The 24-hour price profile shows a sharp morning ramp peaking at $200.06/MWh at 17:00 AEST Friday, a sustained mid-morning plateau in the $91–$120/MWh range through the business day, and a steady retreat through the afternoon and evening back to the current mid-$50s level. Overnight lows dipped briefly into negative territory (-$2.00/MWh) around 14:20–14:30 AEST and touched $0.91/MWh at 11:10–11:15 AEST, indicating periods of supply surplus during the early morning hours.
The current generation mix is dominated by black coal at 3,952.67 MW, with wind contributing a strong 1,359.03 MW and hydro at 518.88 MW. Solar output is negligible at 0.01 MW, consistent with pre-dawn conditions — the daily outlook shows 89% average cloud cover today, limiting solar potential to 0.4 for the day. Both gas OCGT and CCGT units are offline at 0 MW, and battery storage is providing a token 0.02 MW. Renewable penetration currently sits at 32.21%, down from an overnight high of approximately 51% around 12:30–12:40 AEST Friday when wind and overnight conditions combined most favourably, but well above the mid-morning lows of around 26–27% during the peak demand window.
Carbon intensity currently reads 0.5966 tCO2/MWh, tracking in the upper half of today's observed range. Intensity was lightest around 02:30 AEST (0.4302 tCO2/MWh, renewable penetration ~51%) and peaked near 0.6402 tCO2/MWh around 21:55–22:00 AEST Friday as demand pressed higher and the generation mix shifted. Given today's heavy cloud cover suppressing solar and wind potential rated at 2.9, expect carbon intensity to remain in the 0.55–0.62 tCO2/MWh range through the morning before any meaningful wind increase can soften it.
Predispatch forecasts point to a modest price step-up from current levels: the 07:00 AEST half-hour is forecast at $76.88/MWh, rising to $79–$87/MWh for the 07:30 AEST window, consistent with Saturday morning demand building but well short of weekday peak levels. Load optimisation windows through tonight and into tomorrow morning look exceptionally favourable, with forecast prices clustering in the $23–$40/MWh range from 09:00 AEST through to at least 13:30 AEST. The one active market notice of direct operational relevance to NSW today is a planned Cisco ISE server maintenance outage (CHG0110834) scheduled from 20:00–03:00 AEST today; SSL VPN users may experience authentication delays, but no market dispatch impact is expected. Also note EMMS Production Systems are scheduled to transfer to an alternative datacentre on 26 May from