News: Blog

What’s behind the high spot prices? We take a more detailed look at who is setting prices, when and why.

This blog post breakdown the fundamentals of hedging and provides an answer to the question "What is a hedge?".

Both the FPVV and CFD sub-indexes rose sharply this month, and the main index jumped almost 16% as a result. Hardly surprising, given the seemingly inexorable upward movements in spot and futures prices.

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

The HVDC link will be operating with only one pole (one half) in service for most of the first quarter of 2020, to allow essential maintenance to be carried out.  When this was first announced back in December 2017, futures prices barley moved, but they now show an expectation of a price difference between upper north and mid-south islands in the vicinity of $55/M

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?

The government released a consultation paper yesterday on the Clean Car Standard and Clean Car Discount.  The Clean Car Standard would require importers of new and used vehicles to lower the average emissions of the vehicles they bring into the country.  The Clean Car Discount increases the cost of vehicles t

This is the first in a series of three posts on what I see as the most important issues for the electricity market, and by association the gas market, for the 2020s.  This first post is actually a submission to the Gas Indsutry Company's recent consultation on information disclosure in the wholesale gas market.  The GIC documents and all subsmissions can be found at 

Since 23rd May we’ve seen big price spikes, to over $1,000/MWh at Otahuhu for example, consistently during the peak demand at the end of the day.  In this post we take a brief look at what’s causing these spikes.

It’s been a while since our last blog post due to workload and other factors, but it’s a new year and it’s going to be another interesting year in the electricity industry, an industry undergoing change.  In this post we look at the recent announcement by Contact Energy of the sale of the Ahuroa Gas Storage facility to First Gas.

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.

After a long period of low spot prices and low volatility in spot prices, hydro storage lakes are emptying out and it’s a timely reminder that the hydro situation can change very quickly. But it raises the question: when spot prices start to rise, should I stay on a spot pricing plan, or should I switch to a fixed price plan?

I was once again privileged to speak at NZWEA’s annual conference held in Wellington last week, updating some aspects from 2016 and posing a paradox for 2017.

Since launching in August 2016, the Energy Exchange has run reverse auctions covering a range of site types and sizes, proving its ability to deal with the wide range of needs typical of many larger electricity consumers.

One of the many challenges for anyone forecasting electricity spot prices, as Energy Link has done since first trading in 1996, is that some key factors affecting spot prices are fundamentally unpredictable in the short to medium term: inflows to the hydro lakes are a case in point.

This week we released our latest quarterly Price Path, a long term forecast of spot prices, to our subscribers. 2016 has indeed been an uneventful year on the spot market, a function of a warm winter and lots of rain for generation and for pastures. However, the last quarter delivered up some very significant news on the gas front.