Regional Outlook — NSW1: Saturday 22 August 2026
NSW spot price sits at $119.02/MWh at 06:30 AEST, sitting near the top of a tight band that's held since the evening peak began building. Prices climbed steadily from overnight lows of $0-30/MWh (with brief negative pricing between 13:00-14:30 AEST as wind and low demand pushed the market down) through a sharp morning ramp — jumping from $53/MWh at 16:00 AEST to $119/MWh by 17:25 AEST as demand rose from 6,590 MW to 8,326 MW. Demand has since eased back to 7,294 MW as the evening peak passes, with price holding firm at the $119/MWh cap that's recurred throughout the day.
Generation mix is dominated by black coal at 5,867 MW, supplying the bulk of NSW load. Hydro contributes 857 MW, wind 487 MW, gas OCGT a modest 35 MW, solar just 38 MW (reflecting the evening timeframe and 100% cloud cover), and battery output is minimal at 1.65 MW. Renewable penetration sits at 19% for the current interval, down sharply from overnight peaks above 59% — this tracks the diurnal pattern where wind and hydro covered more than half of demand in the early hours before solar dropped away and coal ramped to meet the evening peak. Carbon intensity sits at 0.7117 tCO2/MWh, near the day's high, up from a low of 0.352 tCO2/MWh at 05:00 AEST.
Predispatch forecasts show prices easing through tonight, dropping to $69.99/MWh by 21:30 AEST and falling to single digits by 23:00 AEST as demand tapers overnight. Prices are forecast to turn negative between 03:00-04:30 AEST tomorrow (as low as -$6.60/MWh), consistent with the low-demand, high-renewable overnight window. Tomorrow's morning ramp is forecast to lift prices back above $95/MWh by 08:30 AEST, with a softer trajectory through the day settling near $57-60/MWh by mid-afternoon. Traders with flexible load should note the identified low-cost windows between 01:00-06:00 AEST tomorrow, all showing sub-$2/MWh average pricing and zero carbon intensity, offering savings of $107-114/MWh versus today's peak.
On notices, NSW-specific items are limited to network matters: the Vineyard–Sydney West No. 29 330kV line returned to service on 21 August after a four-day planned outage, and a short-notice outage on the Lismore–Koolkhan 967 132kV line triggered constraint set N-KKLS_967 affecting interconnector flows with QLD. No active market interventions apply to NSW today — the current AEMO direction and foreseeable intervention notices relate to voltage support requirements in SA, with a further SA intervention flagged for 10:30 AEST tomorrow. No NSW-specific reliability or intervention events are in effect.