u/New-Impression-8867

South Australia had a $20k price event on the evening of 21 June. Most batteries weren't ready for it.

Watch the SOC row at the bottom. Every battery starts the day with charge. By mid-morning they're near empty across the board. The price spike doesn't arrive until the evening, by then, many have nothing left to give.

Some seemed to see it coming, recharging through the afternoon and had meaningful SOC heading into the event. The bid heatmaps show positioning shifted through the day while others stayed flat.

Five SA batteries, five different approaches to the same day. The video is built from open AEMO data via NEMPulse.com.au

Would you expect the fleet to be this depleted before a price event?

$912k vs $298k in trading revenue. Same week, same market, different regions.

The chart shows why. QLD batteries cycle hard, repeatedly near-full then near-empty. VIC barely moves, shallow cycles, conservative range. The naive read is that QLD is trading more aggressively and more effectively.

It isn't that simple.

About half of VIC's registered capacity isn't fully operational yet. Strip out the units that aren't really trading and VIC's working fleet earns around $158 per MWh against $124 for QLD. So it flips. QLD makes more in total by cycling hard at a thinner margin. VIC makes more per MWh on far less throughput, and hard cycling carries degradation cost, so the gap is tighter than the headline suggests.

There's a bigger factor behind all of this. VIC's price spread already fell 41% in Q1 2026, before most of the new capacity even switched on. The Melbourne Renewable Energy Hub alone is 600 MW, largely offline. As that commissions, VIC could look very different.

Worth watching whether VIC ends up like QLD, where batteries mostly compete against each other and strategy becomes the main differentiator.

Data is from NEMPulse, which tracks every grid-scale battery in the NEM updated every 5 minutes. Energy and FCAS revenue only, bilateral contracts not included, so not a full P&L.

Would you expect the gap to close as VIC capacity comes online, or does QLD just have better trading conditions?