Commodity Demand — VIC1: Sunday 9 August 2026
Victoria spot price sits at $64.98/MWh at 06:25 AEST with demand at 6,055 MW, up sharply from the overnight trough of ~4,800 MW seen around 06:35 Sunday evening. The overnight period shows textbook demand-price sensitivity: as demand climbed from 4,805 MW to a peak of 7,681 MW between 04:00 and 18:15 AEST, prices tracked from near-zero (-$0.10/MWh) up to $108.19/MWh at 10:35 AEST, before easing back through the afternoon as demand fell toward 4,700-4,900 MW by 17:45-18:15 AEST. This morning's demand ramp already produced a sustained band of $85-96/MWh pricing between 08:00 and 12:15 AEST as demand held above 7,000 MW, with a brief spike to $126.99/MWh at 11:40 AEST coinciding with a local demand pullback — indicating the price response here is being driven more by generator offer stacks thinning at the margin than by demand alone.
The forecast trajectory points to a second, sharper price event tonight. AEMO's forward curve shows demand-linked pricing climbing from $69.25/MWh at 21:00 AEST to $92.84/MWh by 22:00 AEST, holding near $90/MWh through 23:00 AEST, before collapsing to $15-45/MWh overnight as demand drops off after midnight. Tomorrow's morning peak is forecast to be materially tighter than today's: prices are projected to reach $106-113/MWh between 09:00 and 10:30 AEST, roughly $15-20/MWh above today's comparable peak, consistent with cold, overcast, low-solar conditions (89% cloud cover, 0.3% average solar potential) constraining renewable output through the morning ramp.
Current generation mix confirms the tightening supply picture behind these price moves: brown coal is running at 4,169 MW and wind at 1,971 MW, with solar at zero given current darkness and cloud cover, pushing carbon intensity to 0.82 tCO2/MWh and renewable penetration down to 31.75% from the 50%+ levels seen at 21:00 last night. No demand-side notices are currently affecting Victoria specifically; the active AEMO notices centre on an unplanned Bayswater-Sydney West 330kV line outage in NSW (invoking constraint N-BWSW_32, which includes VIC1-NSW1 on the equation LHS) and SA-related contingency reclassifications — both bear watching for potential flow-on effects to Victorian import/export capacity during today's peak windows, but neither has yet manifested as a binding constraint in the VIC1 price series.