Price Atlas · VIC1 half-hourly spot price
Eight years of Victorian prices, one pixel per half hour
Each column is a day, each row a half hour (midnight at the top). The amber bars underneath show what a perfectly informed 300 MW / 580 MWh battery could have earned that day. Watch the midday band turn pink as negative prices spread.
2018 · Training
Every half hour of 2018
Mean price
$90.46
median $81.50
Highest
$12,931.04
lowest -$554.62
Negative half-hours
57
0.3% of the year
Perfect battery
$33.4M
$31.0M after fixed O&M
The duck curve
Average price by time of day, every year
Batteries live on the gap between the midday trough and the evening peak. Solar has pushed the trough down year after year (and the 2022 gas crisis lifted the peaks), which is why the same battery earns far more from 2022 onwards than in the brief's training years.
Year by year
Prices and perfect-foresight revenue
| Year | Mean | Negative half-hours | Perfect battery |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $90.46 | 57 | $33.4M |
| 2019 | $109.36 | 123 | $44.6M |
| 2020 | $51.89 | 769 | $30.4M |
| 2021 | $44.91 | 2,704 | $36.1M |
| 2022 | $134.06 | 2,568 | $60.4M |
| 2023 | $54.78 | 4,065 | $48.3M |
| 2024 | $82.13 | 3,996 | $68.6M |
| 2025 | $77.89 | 4,218 | $56.8M |
Perfect battery: sum of daily optima, starting each day empty. Fixed O&M is $2,430,000 a year. From October 2021 the NEM settles every five minutes; those prices are averaged to half hours here.