Two hours, A$5.6m: what one NSW price spike reveals about battery behaviour

Serguey Asael Shinder14 October 2026, 09:322 min read

For about two hours on the afternoon of 12 October 2026, wholesale electricity prices in New South Wales behaved the way battery investment cases assume they sometimes will. According to figures compiled by Franz David Schaefer, a senior analytics specialist at retailer EnergyAustralia, and reported by Energy-Storage.news, prices averaged A$7,415/MWh between 14:10 and 16:05, swung between roughly A$700 and A$23,000/MWh from one dispatch interval to the next, and peaked at A$23,107/MWh — just below the A$23,200/MWh market price cap the AEMC set for 2026–27. The independent dashboard NEMPulse classified the event as "extreme"; WattClarity attributed the spikes to sudden jumps in NSW demand of almost 500 MW in a single interval.

What the fleet earned. The NSW batteries took an estimated A$5.63m in those two hours, about A$47,000 a minute. For scale, Schaefer compares it with A$9.1m for the entire NEM battery fleet over the whole previous week, and with Victoria's best single day of the third quarter, A$2.42m.

Who earned it. The distribution was uneven. ACEN Australia's New England BESS led with about A$1.82m across two units — its first unit drew down from 96% to 45.1% state of charge for A$1.21m. The recently commissioned Waratah Super Battery followed with about A$995,000, ahead of Eraring's first unit (A$935,000) and Akaysha's Orana (A$866,000). Eraring's second unit, still in commissioning, added A$117,000 from a state of charge of just 7%.

The more interesting number is who did not. Of the 17 NSW batteries in the data, ten discharged, one was charging and six sat idle, with a seventh offline. The idle group included the Liddell BESS, which held 95.3% state of charge and 497 MW of availability but had 104.2 MW committed to frequency control ancillary services. Wallgrove was charging during the spike and still recorded about A$202,000, with 64.5 MW in FCAS. Schaefer's own comment is careful: "Some of that will be contracts or network obligations, but probably not all of it."

What to take from it. A single event like this is not a revenue forecast, and the figures are one analyst's estimate rather than settlement data. But it illustrates two points that averages hide. First, a large part of a merchant battery's year can depend on being charged and available in a handful of intervals. Second, being available is not the same as being dispatched for energy: contracts, FCAS commitments and network obligations decide how much of a full battery actually meets a price spike, and on 12 October that was the difference between leading the table and earning nothing.

Source: Energy-Storage.news, "New South Wales BESS earn nearly AU$6 million as two-hour 'extreme' price event sweeps Australia's energy market" — https://www.energy-storage.news/new-south-wales-bess-earn-nearly-au6-million-as-two-hour-extreme-price-event-s