Ian Verender

You hook up with a provider and they will sell power into the system when prices are very high.

And that's generally at nighttime when you don't have a lot of renewable generation.

So we're evening out the whole distribution.

So instead of it all going into the system in one hit, it's going out over the course of the 24 hours.

And AEMA, which is the Australian Energy Market Operator,

put out a report a few weeks ago, which basically showed that gas no longer is the price setter for electricity.

And why is that important?

Because gas has been extraordinarily expensive because we've had a couple of big export companies essentially denuding the local market of supply.

And so gas prices here have been hugely expensive.

And because it's that final stage, it's that emergency kick-in

Yeah, the marginal operator.

That's right.

It's the marginal operator.

It sets the price.

So when the price of gas went up, the price of electricity soared, as we saw after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And that soaring electricity prices really drove a lot of the inflation problem that we had.

And so what we've seen now is that gas is no longer the price setter.

Batteries, for the first time, have become the price setter.

If you look at the inflation numbers from the most recent ones for April, in the past 12 months, the 12 months leading up to April, electricity prices were up 23%, I think.

23%.