Spot price go 📈

Spot price go

Excursion: Frequency

Time: 04-feb-2026 20:30
Location: National

Affected Plant: Benmore Haywards 1 Tripped

SI Hz Level: 51.03
NI Hz Level: 49.20

Both islands shot outside their allowed ranges of 49.5 to 50.5 Hz when that tripped.

Oh and there's the outage notification

Cause: Unplanned Outage
Outage/At: HVDC Pole 3
Starting: 04-feb-2026 20:30
Ending: 05-feb-2026 01:00

Has slashed the inter-island transfer capacity from 1200MW North/600MW South to just 500MW North/489MW South.

It was sending about 755 MW north at the last data point at 2000 I can see 🫠

The interesting thing about 49.2 Hz as noted in the excursion notice - that's the interruptible load trip frequency if it stayed there for 1 second. Wonder if this event was long enough for any of the large interruptible loads to get tripped off to protect the grid.

Sustained Instantaneous Reserve (SIR) is well high right now, $191. Wholesale price is like $230/MWh.

The interesting thing about 49.2 Hz as noted in the excursion notice - that's the interruptible load trip frequency if it stayed there for 1 second. Wonder if this event was long enough for any of the large interruptible loads to get tripped off to protect the grid.

Sustained Instantaneous Reserve (SIR) is well high right now, $191. Wholesale price is like $230/MWh.

When that happened, North Island generation had to find 464 MW in basically an instant

That was the "flip" between before and after event (it's half hourly data, so a bit of fudge factor there but still)

That price split between islands...