Commodity Demand — VIC1: Friday 5 June 2026

Victoria sits at $77.11/MWh with demand at 5,089.6 MW as of 06:25 AEST — well below the overnight peaks of 7,400–7,590 MW reached during the morning demand surge that drove prices consistently into the $90–$113/MWh range between 17:00 and 19:00 AEST. Today's demand profile has followed a textbook Saturday winter pattern: a sharp ramp from the overnight trough of around 4,565 MW (reached near 03:55 AEST) through a sustained morning peak, then a pronounced midday softening as prices collapsed to sub-$30/MWh — touching -$0.05/MWh at 01:40 AEST local — before demand began rebuilding through the afternoon and into the current interval.

The price-demand relationship across today's data is tight and consistent. Demand above 7,000 MW reliably produced prices in the $87–$113/MWh band, while the 4,600–4,800 MW window between 02:45 and 04:00 AEST corresponded with prices of $15–$35/MWh. The current 5,089.6 MW reading sits at an inflection point: demand is rebuilding from the afternoon trough and prices are responding, with the last five intervals showing a step from ~$50/MWh back up to $77.11/MWh. Generation mix at 06:30 AEST shows brown coal at 4,694.75 MW, wind at 1,377.74 MW, and battery dispatching 255.15 MW — renewables at 26.42% with carbon intensity at 0.8976 tCO2/MWh, reflecting reduced wind contribution relative to the midday period when intensity dropped as low as 0.7619 tCO2/MWh.

Forecast RRPs for the 07:00–08:00 AEST half-hours cluster tightly in the $75–$83/MWh range across multiple forecast runs, signalling market expectation of continued moderate pricing as demand rebuilds toward the Saturday evening peak. On a Saturday, that peak typically materialises between 08:00 and 10:00 AEST, and if tonight's trajectory mirrors the overnight pattern — demand pushing back through 6,500–7,000 MW — prices in the $90–$110/MWh range are a credible outcome. The Koorangie–Wemen 220 kV line returned to service at 05:20 AEST after a planned outage running since 25 May, removing constraint set V-KOWE; this restores full transfer capacity on that corridor and reduces binding constraint risk on northbound flows into Victoria for the rest of today.

Flexible load operators have strong incentive to front-run the evening demand build. Load window forecasts for the 07:30–10:00 AEST period price in at $10–$37/MWh — roughly 60–80% below today's morning peak — making the next two to three hours the lowest-cost consumption window of the day before the next demand-driven price step up.