Loading Solar Analytica
Loading Solar Analytica
The open month of the release record: every entry dated this month, newest first, with the decision read it carries and the dated steps it leaves open. A month becomes a pinned edition when it closes and the desk writes one reading against it.
Open month · last entry 22 Oct 2026 · operating series to 23 Oct 2026
Market update
Tariff structure
Markets
On 8 September the Governor in Council made the Midday Power Saver Pricing Order 2026 (Victoria Government Gazette S 498), and since 1 October every Victorian retailer with 1,000 or more domestic customers has had to offer the Midday Power Saver to households with a smart meter that choose it. Usage from 11am to 2pm is priced at $0 per kWh up to a fair use cap of 24 kWh for each day's window at each connection point. Above the cap a retailer may charge up to the Order's excess rate, which is also its 2pm to 4pm rate: 18.64 to 19.83 c/kWh by distribution zone. The daily supply charge still applies, and controlled load is outside the offer. The Premier's release of 28 May puts eligible households at 2.6 million.
Decision read
For a household on the offer, solar used at home between 11am and 2pm displaces an import priced at zero up to the cap, so it saves nothing on the bill in those hours. On our reading, the value of rooftop output and of a battery moves to the hours the Order still prices: up to 39.75 to 49.82 c/kWh from 4pm to 9pm, and 23.22 to 24.78 c/kWh from 9pm to 11am. Payback figures built on a flat or conventional time-of-use tariff do not carry over to this plan. The Solar Sharer Offer the AER set in July for three default market offer regions uses the same cap and, outside South Australia, the same window. The 189 MW median step in Victorian demand after 11am that the Solar Sharer signal measured over July to September 2026 came before retailers had to offer this one. The Essential Services Commission sets the prices from 1 July 2027 and must make that determination by 1 June, 30 days before they apply.
Midday Power Saver Pricing Order 2026, Victoria Government Gazette S 498, 8 September 2026
Publication
Solar economics
Markets
From AEMO's WEM data, the value factor of SWIS rooftop solar in 2024 was -0.000071 on AEMO's 30-minute rooftop estimate and 0.10 to 0.12 on its 5-minute estimate, and about half of its energy was produced in Trading Intervals with a negative price. That year 44 Trading Intervals cleared at the -$1,000/MWh floor, matching the Economic Regulation Authority's own list. Before the 1 October 2023 market reform, rooftop solar's value factor was between 0.61 and 0.68 and the five listed solar farms' between 0.71 and 0.87; after it, the solar farms' was 0.85 in 2024 and 0.79 in 2025.
Decision read
The two market regimes price energy differently and are reported separately, never joined into one series. After the reform the rooftop figure is a range across AEMO's two estimates with no preferred point, and the 30-minute estimate carries broken days that are material in 2024 and 2025. AEMO's Reference Trading Price is kept as published, and its 20 breaches of the six-price identity are counted and classified. A value factor is wholesale system value, not what a solar farm or a household received, and nothing here measures curtailment.
AEMO WEM data: Balancing Summary, Reference Trading Price, Market Clearing Prices, Facility SCADA and distributed PV estimates, January 2019 to December 2025, reconciled to the ERA's Energy Offer Price Floor review 2025
Data release
Battery subsidy record
Markets
On 15 October the Clean Energy Regulator released its September-quarter carbon market data workbook ahead of the full report. It puts cumulative battery capacity installed and approved under the Cheaper Home Batteries Program at 13,414.1 MWh at 30 June 2026. The June-quarter workbook put the same figure at 12,393 MWh. Capacity installed in the June quarter alone moved from 3,582.4 MWh to 4,446.9 MWh.
Decision read
The further back the quarter, the smaller the restatement: 1.8 per cent for March 2026 and 0.6 per cent for September 2025, the shape the twelve-month certificate creation period predicts. The first reading for the September quarter, 1,873.7 MWh, is the least complete number in the series and does not on its own show a slowdown. The June workbook describes the figure as validated installations and the September workbook as approved ones; the Regulator has not said whether the basis changed. The same workbook splits installations either side of the 1 May 2026 restructure: systems of 28 to 50 kWh fell from 44.9 to 27.4 per cent of installations, and systems of 14 to 28 kWh rose from 35.6 to 56.6 per cent.
Clean Energy Regulator, Quarterly Carbon Market Report data workbook, September quarter 2026, Figures 3.1 and 3.2, released 15 October 2026, with the June-quarter workbook's Figure 3.1 as the earlier vintage
Market update
Tariff structure
Markets
Since July 2026 retailers with more than 1,000 customers across the default market offer regions have had to make a Solar Sharer Offer: an opt-in standing offer for residential customers with smart meters in New South Wales, south-east Queensland and South Australia, with a free usage period of 11am to 2pm (12pm to 3pm in South Australia) fixed in local time year-round. Use above 24 kWh in the window attracts a reasonable usage charge. The Australian Energy Regulator set the first offer on the time-of-use DMO cost stack and moved the forgone revenue onto the other usage charges, so the Ausgrid peak rate sits at about 64 c/kWh against 49 c/kWh on Energex and 59 c/kWh on SA Power Networks.
Decision read
The offer is a regulated tariff with its own comparison price, so the midday value gap now has a published retail price of zero in three regions. Customers cannot be placed on it by default or on rollover, and the AER publishes no opt-in count. The load response can be read from AEMO's five-minute regional demand. Across the 92 days of July to September 2026, the median rise in the interval after 11am local time, net of the surrounding trend, was 156 MW in New South Wales, 122 MW in Queensland and 189 MW in Victoria, against 72, 92 and 48 MW a year earlier. When daylight saving began on 4 October, Victoria's step moved an hour earlier in market time and Queensland's stayed where it was, so the step follows the household clock. Victoria is outside the offer's regions and carries the largest step, and South Australia shows none at its 12pm start (a median of 7 MW), so the offer accounts for part of the step at most.
Australian Energy Regulator, Solar Sharer Offer fact sheet, DMO 8 final determination, May 2026
Market update
SWIS policy
Risk
On 9 October the Department of Energy and Economic Diversification put out for comment the assumptions behind the Future Energy System Outlook 2027, the outlook that will fulfil the Whole of System Plan requirement in the market rules. The first Whole of System Plan was released in October 2020. The new package is a 53-page draft, ten appendices and an inputs workbook, and it tests three futures to 2050, which the department calls Central, Rapid Change and Constrained. Under the current draft modelling, electric vehicles in 2050 range from about 1.3 million in Constrained to 2.1 million in Rapid Change. Rooftop solar ranges from about 13 GW to 27 GW.
Decision read
Every figure here is a draft input, which the department says it will reconsider as the modelling is finalised and the final assumptions are prepared, and it describes the three scenarios as tests of plausible futures rather than predictions. Rooftop uptake feeds the demand forecast, and the network and resource-planning models work from that forecast, so the gap of about 14 GW between the low and high rooftop cases carries through to whatever the outlook later says the SWIS needs to build. Submissions close on Friday 23 October. The department has the draft outlook down for the second quarter of 2027.
Department of Energy and Economic Diversification, Draft Methodology, Inputs, Scenarios and Assumptions for the Future Energy System Outlook 2027, October 2026, read 12 October 2026
Market update
Market data
Grid
At midnight on 1 October AEMO registered the New South Wales to South Australia interconnector, Project EnergyConnect, as NSW1-SA1, with a capacity of 150 MW in either direction (market notice 145435). AEMO's notice had the Bundey to Buronga line out of service until a planned return at noon. The new link carried nothing for just over twelve hours, then carried power in all but two recorded intervals to the end of 8 October. Over those eight days the dispatch record shows 8.8 GWh moving into New South Wales and 4.8 GWh into South Australia. The direction followed the clock. From 2 to 8 October, 377 of the 504 intervals between 7 am and 1 pm flowed into South Australia, and 310 of the 333 between 6 pm and 10 pm flowed into New South Wales.
Decision read
These are AEMO's five-minute dispatch target flows in NEM time, not metered flow, and 8 of the 2,304 intervals are missing from the record. The link ran at 149 MW or more in either direction in 113 intervals, 62 of them on 6 and 7 October, so how often it meets its limit is the figure to watch while testing continues. Transgrid's project page still lists commissioning and inter-network testing as in progress, timed for mid to late 2026.
AEMO market notice 145435, 1 October 2026; AEMO NEMWeb dispatch interconnector results (MWFLOW), 1 to 8 October 2026
Market update
Solar economics
Markets
A Victorian Energy Policy Centre working paper by Bruce Mountain (September 2026) studies 5,096 households in four NEM states: 3,049,653 site-day observations over three years to August 2025, supplied by AGL Energy. It finds no evidence that households of any type respond to the size of the peak to off-peak price differential. Solar-plus-battery households on a time-of-use tariff used around 13 per cent less in peak windows than other households on the same tariff, at the sample mean. On flat tariffs, battery households were statistically indistinguishable from non-solar households.
Decision read
The measured effect follows tariff structure, not the size of the price gap, so a battery's peak reduction cannot be assumed independent of the tariff it sits on. The ownership comparison is cross-sectional, and the author records an unexplained association between time-of-use enrolment and peak use among non-solar households as a limitation. The temporal value model prices battery value by the hour under a stated tariff; this paper is observed household evidence on whether dispatch follows that tariff.
Victorian Energy Policy Centre, Storage and Signals, working paper, September 2026
Publication
Solar economics
Markets
From AEMO's half-hourly estimate of rooftop output and its five-minute prices, the value factor of NEM rooftop solar fell from between 0.78 and 0.98 in 2019 to between 0.02 and 0.31 in 2025, and has sat below the utility solar value factor in every region in every year since 2020. Victoria's rooftop value factor was below zero across 2023, at -0.10. In 2025, 66 per cent of South Australia's rooftop energy was produced in half hours with a negative wholesale price.
Decision read
Rooftop solar is the larger fleet, an estimated 28,862 GWh across the four mainland regions in 2025 against 18,133 GWh from solar farms, and it mostly keeps producing when prices go negative. The measurement-based estimate reproduces AEMO's published Q4 2025 distributed PV averages for NSW, Queensland and Victoria exactly. This is the wholesale value of the energy at the times it is produced, not what households are paid through feed-in tariffs and avoided retail prices.
AEMO MMSDM ROOFTOP_PV_ACTUAL and DISPATCHPRICE, January 2019 to December 2025, reconciled to AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics Q4 2025
Publication
SWIS reference
Grid
From CER small-scale solar records and ABS population for the same 246 statistical areas, rooftop solar in the SWIS screening boundary rose from 76 watts per resident at the end of 2011 to 1,045 watts at the end of 2025. Installation records peaked in 2011 and capacity added peaked in 2021, as the average system added grew from 2.2 kW to 8.8 kW.
Decision read
Reading another grid against this path needs figures on the same basis, and the cross-market capacity series the site holds cannot supply them: it mixes rooftop with utility-scale solar, converts AC and DC case by case, and does not document the population it divides by. A market can sit on this path once its figures are rooftop only, counted against a matched population, and paired with an operating record. Recent years will still rise while certificates can be created up to 12 months after installation.
Clean Energy Regulator postcode capacity records and ABS estimated resident population, via the SWIS DER snapshot, CER edition 2026-07
Publication
Solar economics
Markets
Computed from AEMO's five-minute dispatch prices and unit output, the value factor of NEM utility-scale solar, its output-weighted price over the time-weighted average, was between 0.78 and 1.06 across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria in 2019, and between 0.28 and 0.53 in 2025. The share of utility solar output generated at a negative regional price rose from under 5 per cent in every region to more than a third in every region, and to 49.5 per cent in Queensland.
Decision read
Over the same years utility solar output across the four regions rose from 5,115 GWh to 18,133 GWh, into the same daylight hours. The series reproduces AEMO's own published figures, $17/MWh for South Australian solar farms in Q4 2020 and 2,535 MW of average grid-scale solar output in Q4 2025, but it measures wholesale system value at each regional reference node, not project revenue, and observed output slightly flatters it because farms that curtail at negative prices drop out of the weighting.
AEMO MMSDM monthly archives, January 2019 to December 2025, reconciled to AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics Q4 2020 and Q4 2025
10 entries in October 2026. The month is open, so this page changes as releases enter the record.
The same window on three grids, observed daily and read from the operations tables rather than the event ledger. Reference lines are the detector’s own thresholds. A run that began before the first of the month is shown from the first, so a reading here is a month and never a record.
Days in October 2026 when South Australia ran five-minute intervals below zero. The detector writes an event from 12 intervals, one hour.
AEMO NEMWeb, via the daily operations record
Renewables and nuclear as a share of positive reported generation and imports, daily through October 2026.
Elexon daily reported generation mix
The daily minimum of operational demand on the SWIS through October 2026. No record value for this measure is held in the record, so none is drawn.
AEMO WEM operational demand
The month’s entries and the steps they left open, sent once when the edition is pinned. No account, no saved filter, and nothing sent while the month is still open.