News: Energy Trendz Monthly, Blog, Electricity market

The Electricity Authority’s Market Development Group (MDAG) recently consulted on the initial phase of its investigation into price formation, with 100% renewable generation in our energy-only market. Energy Link contributed to this work and has also submitted.

We have often pointed out that ASX futures prices don’t always appear to behave rationally.  In this post we look at the spread (difference) between the ASX futures prices at Benmore and Otahuhu.

The frequency of blog posts fell off last year after October as we found ourselves in an early Christmas rush period. We hope to be more consistent this year. First up, our submission on the Electricity Authority’s wholesale market review.

The main index fell by 7.6% this month, mainly the result of a fall in the FPVV sub-index. This month the data showed six new long-term contracts of ten year terms, following on from the three that appeared last month.

This week Greg Sise provides a summary of his presentation on the problem of price formation with 100% renewable electricity, which he presented at the the Electricity Authority’s Market Development Advisory Group (MDAG) recently.

The blackout event of Monday 9th August caused a huge amount of negative publicity for the electricity market, but let’s take a closer look at some interesting aspects of this event.

There were only 3 contracts traded that were eligible to include in the index calculations this month, following the trend in April of low volumes of trading.

“We’re about to launch a new, free tool on our web site. It calculates the LCOE of your generation project. But what the f*&% is it?"

If you have some small-scale generation, how do you sell its generation output? This post briefly describes some common scenarios.

The Tiwai Pt aluminium smelter has received a stay of execution, with the news last week that Meridian Energy and the smelter’s majority owner, Rio Tinto, reached agreement on 13th January to amend their existing agreement so that its termination date is now 31st December 2024, and not August 2021.

Rio Tinto, the majority owner of the Tiwai Pt aluminium smelter, announced last Thursday, 9th July, that it has terminated its electricity contracts with Meridian Energy and that it will close the smelter by August 2021.  This will have a profound impact on the electricity sector which will be felt for years to co

A thought on everyone’s mind these days, or at least those involved in electricity supply, is what is Covid-19 doing to electricity demand?  Well, the answer to this question is not simple, and we are working on it, but the answers will come highly qualified by the uncertainty surrounding the disease in New Zealand, the econ

Spot prices surged late last year when there was a prolonged, unplanned outage at the Pohokura gas field offshore Taranaki.  But they haven’t come back down to where they were prior to the gas outages.  In this post we look at the reasons why and ask the question on everyone’s mind – will they remain high?

This is the third in a series of three posts on what I see as the most important issues for the electricity market for the 2020s and beyond.  The first issue was woeful lack of disclosure in the gas market, and the second issue was the ineffectiveness of the electricity hedge market.  This third and final issue is on the challenge of moving toward extremely high level

This is the second in a series of three posts on what I see as the most important issues for the electricity market for the 2020s.  The first issue was disclosure in the gas market, which has as much impact on electricity as it has on gas, and is woefully inadequate.  The second issue, and the topic of this post, is the electricity hedge market:  how it is not working for new retail

We’ve been asked many times recently why spot prices are so high, so this has prompted me to finally put fingers to keyboard for another blog.  The spot prices are a function of low hydro storage, restricted fuel supplies, and plant outages.

It’s ironic that this month’s announcement that there will be no new offshore oil and gas exploration permits issued in New Zealand was titled “Planning for the future…”. This announcement was totally out of the blue and if there is a “plan” somewhere, it appears that no one outside of government knows what it is.

The majority of direct and indirect participants in the electricity market, from generators and retailers through to large consumers, aren’t aware that there is an essential piece of market intelligence available free on this very web site. And this month we publish it for the 100th time.

With the storage lakes falling fast, it got me thinking about other ‘dry year’ events we’ve experienced, which really helps to put the present, and the market, into context.