Regional Outlook — VIC1: Sunday 24 May 2026

The Victoria spot price sits at **$88.97/MWh** at 06:25 AEST, with total demand at 5,346 MW and rising. That current price represents a marked step down from the morning peak, which ran sustained intervals above $110/MWh from roughly 13:00 to 21:00 AEST, with isolated spikes to $146/MWh around 18:45 AEST. The 24-hour price profile shows a classic winter weekday shape — a prolonged morning/daytime peak anchored well above $100/MWh, softening through the afternoon trough to the low-to-mid $60s, then recovering sharply into the evening demand rise that is now underway.

The generation mix is heavily weighted to brown coal, which is producing **4,577 MW** — approximately 88% of the local generation stack. Wind is contributing **607 MW** (roughly 12%), hydro a marginal **10 MW**, and battery **0.4 MW**. Solar output is zero at this hour, consistent with the overnight period and heavy cloud cover (87%). Gas — both OCGT and CCGT — is offline. That thin wind contribution is a function of very low wind potential (0.2 out of a possible scale), and forecasts show wind potential remaining similarly subdued across at least the next two days with 86–98% cloud cover and minimums around 11°C. Renewable penetration sits at **11.9%**, the lowest point in the 24-hour period; it peaked at 24% during midday intervals when wind was stronger and demand was lower, before declining steadily through the evening.

Carbon intensity is **1.0748 tCO2/MWh**, up from a daytime low of approximately 0.91 tCO2/MWh around 11:00–12:00 AEST when renewable penetration was highest. The current intensity level reflects the high brown coal share of a rising demand profile with minimal wind. Sustainability managers should note this is one of the more carbon-intensive grid states of the past 24 hours, and the outlook for tomorrow — with average solar potential of just 1.1 and wind potential 0.2 — offers little relief. Pre-dispatch forecasts for the 07:00–07:30 AEST intervals (21:00–21:30 UTC) are centred around **$103–106/MWh**, with earlier runs having shown a wider range of $105–137/MWh for the 07:30 slot before settling back; the most recent forecast pegs 07:30 AEST at approximately **$106/MWh**. Load window analysis confirms that prices ease materially into the early hours of 25 May (AEST), with multiple intervals forecast in the $40–70/MWh range from roughly 10:00 AEST through to pre-dawn.

The one active market notice directly relevant to Victoria's interconnector position is the **Tailem Bend 275 kV East Bus outage** (Market Notice 144139), which invoked constraint set S-TB275_E_BUS on the V-SA interconnector at 12:50 AEST on 24 May. This constrains inter-regional transfer capability on the VIC–SA link and remains active. Traders managing cross-border positions or relying on SA import capability should treat the V-SA interconnector as subject to reduced limits until further notice from AEMO. A separate EMMS systems maintenance window is scheduled