Highlights from the Australian market
- Victoria’s 28 November election has become a referendum on the 475km VNI West transmission line, which the Coalition and One Nation have pledged to scrap even though Yallourn’s 2028 exit will leave a 1,482MW hole in the grid. Endgame’s Oliver Nunn is quoted throughout on what the election means for the energy transition, and Endgame modelling finds that cancelling the link would push Victorian prices up by about $20/MWh from 2036.
- Days before entering caretaker mode, the Victorian government approved two large wind farms, including Andrew Forrest’s Moreton Hill project, only five months after it applied. On average, wind farm approvals in Victoria have taken 1,096 days over the past five years.
- A NSW parliamentary committee found the state’s $50 billion data centre pipeline could use more than twice the electricity of all Sydney households, though speculative “phantom” connection requests make the real impact difficult to calculate.
- GB Energy’s $1 billion-plus Golden Beach gas storage project has collapsed into administration, two weeks after the Victorian government awarded it a production licence. The project would have lifted the state’s gas storage capacity by about 70%, but delays and rising costs left it without funding to reach a final investment decision, and Origin has appointed receivers.
- About 35,000 home batteries are still being installed every month despite subsidy cuts in May, with the program’s cost now estimated at over $5 billion as the Treasurer looks for savings.
- The ABC looked at whether Snowy 2.0 still has a place as batteries reshape the grid, with the project now costed at $25 billion but offering long-duration storage that batteries can’t yet match on cost.
- Eku Energy’s 250MW/500MWh battery at Williamsdale, the ACT’s largest, is now online about a year behind schedule, with the ACT government paying $368 million over 15 years in return for half of the net revenue.
- About 14,000 kerbside EV chargers will be installed on power poles from 2027 under the federal Accelerating EV Charging Program, but without dedicated parking many could end up blocked by petrol and diesel cars.
- The NT government has introduced a bill to remove the legal requirement to set aside water for the environment and lift caps on industry water use. Conservation groups and the Central Land Council say it paves the way for more fracking, data centres and agriculture.
News from Japan
- Kraftia (formerly Kyudenko) and Kyocera have submitted plans to switch Japan’s largest planned solar project to FIP with co-located battery storage. The 400MWac/480MWdc project on Ukushima Island off Nagasaki secured a 40 yen/kWh FIT in FY2012, but permitting difficulties and the need for undersea cables to the mainland mean construction has yet to begin.
- Japan’s latest onshore wind auction awarded 329MW at an average FIP price of 11.12 yen/kWh, at or below the estimated LCOE of 12–16 yen/kWh. Developers will likely recoup their costs through PPAs of 15–20 yen/kWh, once non-fossil certificate value (3–4 yen/kWh) is added on top of the FIP price.
- Hokkaido has opened a call for about 1GW of data centres across six sites in Ishikari and Tomakomai, two of METI’s Green Transformation (GX) strategy zones, with operations expected from 2030–31. Hokkaido EPCO has signed an agreement with the prefecture, and its TSO has committed to the grid upgrades needed to connect them.
News from the UAE
- ADNOC has become the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s Frontier technology under an agreement with OpenAI and G42. It will integrate AI across its operational, investment and commercial decision-making, running on UAE-based inference infrastructure.
Featured article: Trading Places
Market, machine and model – what each is telling you when the curve moves.
In our latest article, we compare three views of the NEM forward curve: the traded market, our machine learning forecast and our fundamental capacity expansion model.
Trading places – Endgame Analytics
Podcast of the week
Ausgrid’s Wired for Good looks at the shift from reactive to predictive and the future of grid maintenance, as host Sarah Aubrey talks with Ausgrid’s General Manager Strategy Mark Ragusa and CutlerMerz’s Tim Edwards. They discuss how drones, AI and predictive analytics can catch faults earlier, prepare networks for extreme weather and balance reliability with affordability.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4GxKIq2laW8z2X28GWejKU?si=c2db41c9911c4b3b