Interconnector Watch: Friday 18 September 2026
VIC-NSW (VIC1-NSW1) is the standout this morning: it's binding at its full export limit of 720.26 MW, flowing from Victoria into NSW at 100% utilisation. This is consistent with the stark price differential between the two regions — VIC sits at just $0.01/MWh against NSW's $64.31/MWh — with cheap Victorian generation flowing north to help meet NSW demand of 6,797 MW, but the interconnector is capacity-constrained from pushing more and fully closing that price gap.
Heywood (V-SA) is exporting 187 MW from Victoria into South Australia, using around 44% of its 426.88 MW import limit into SA — comfortable headroom, and consistent with SA also printing $0.01/MWh alongside VIC. Murraylink (V-S-MNSP1) is sitting near zero (-0.3 MW), effectively idle despite having 80 MW of capacity in either direction — with VIC and SA prices converged at the floor, there's little incentive for flow on this link right now. Basslink (T-V-MNSP1) is flowing 345.24 MW from Tasmania into Victoria, around 92% of its 373.78 MW import limit — high utilisation, though not binding, and Tasmania's $0.01/MWh price reflects ample generation being exported north.
On the Queensland links, NSW1-QLD1 (QNI) is barely active at 16.26 MW into QLD despite a 876.65 MW export limit — negligible utilisation, unsurprising given NSW and QLD prices are near-identical at $64.31/MWh and $64.83/MWh respectively, leaving no meaningful arbitrage incentive. Directlink (N-Q-MNSP1) shows zero flow, sitting idle within its ±79 MW band.
On constraints, no active binding limit is being driven by contingency reclassifications right now — last night's lightning-related reclassifications on the Farrell-Reece and Gordon-Chapel St 220kV lines in Tasmania have both been cancelled, reverting those circuits to non-credible status and releasing the associated constraint sets (F-T-FARE_N-2, F-T-CSGO) from Basslink's flow calculations. The more relevant current factor is the short-notice outage of the Hazelwood-South Morang No.2 500kV line in Victoria from 20:50 yesterday, which invoked the V-HWSM constraint set touching Basslink, Murraylink, Heywood and VIC-NSW simultaneously — this is likely contributing to VIC-NSW binding at its export limit today. Traders should watch for any relaxation of V-HWSM through the day, as its resolution could free up additional VIC-NSW capacity and further compress the NSW-VIC price spread.