Thread by @chrisfromamber

Wanted to share some stories about what went down for amber customers with wholesale prices during the wild price spikes on Jan 24th.

Will have to stay a little vague as we are still small and I don’t want to accidentally share any potentially identifying information /thread

1/ Background: Jan 24 in SA and VIC saw incredibly hot temperatures, driving high demand for electricity. Combined with some inconvenient outages by major coal plants this drove extremely high prices for 5 hours

2/ We notified customers of the potential of this spike in the morning, although tbh we were sceptical if it would end up occurring as we’d seen a number of false alarms already in the summer

3/ Overall we saw a pretty amazing response from amber customers to reduce demand and help stabilise the grid for everyone.

On a day of record high temperatures and demand, over 50% of customers substantially reduced their usage during peak times

4/ >30% of our customers (which means ~60% of those who have solar) actually made money during the event, with the highest earning almost $150 during the spike

5/ On the flip side, some customers would have been caught out, with some consuming >$150 during the period (We apply a cap of 40c/kWh for monthly average price, so these customers won’t end up paying these costs).

6/ Amber customers in SA are typically saving 20-30% per year. Our estimates are that if you consumed in line with market during this event that goes down by 5-10%, which is pretty substantial.

7/ If you’ve got solar set up then the trade-off becomes pretty amazing – if you go out for dinner and a movie that night, then amber basically covers the costs for you!

8/ In general the last hour of the spike was the most brutal and saw higher usage, presumably as the need to increase air conditioners, etc, increased after earlier demand reduction. Shorter spikes are easier to manage around

9/ We’ve taken away a lot of learnings from the event. I think the top 1 is the need to improve the accuracy of our forecasts and the need to be able to communicate more regularly to people during these extreme events. Real-time monitoring of loads would also be extremely helpful

10/ Events like this also call out the value and need of automated battery and demand response. A battery customer combined with amber wholesale prices could have potentially earned >$300 during the periods

Thanks for the prompt to get this out @simonahac @drzax @KetanJ0. And bring on more demand response @craigmemery!

More coming with @4paulmcardle 😀