Beware of Big Batteries Charging at Night

FROM THE ABC NEWS 22/08/2026

In the wee hours of a cold night last month, as most West Australians slept in their beds, a strange thing happened in the state’s biggest and most important electricity system.

About 1am, prices on the spot market started to soar.

They had been hovering at an elevated level of roughly $120 per megawatt-hour (MWh) but suddenly began to climb to extreme highs of more than $350/MWh.

Driving that jump in prices was no catastrophic loss of a high-voltage power line or a major coal-fired plant.

It was a spike in demand and it was coming from an unexpected source.

The surge was coming from batteries, the very things supposedly designed to prevent just such a breakout in prices.

THAT TOOK A LONG TIME TO COME OUT!

GEMINI REPORT

The July 12 nocturnal price spike did not receive wide mainstream newspaper coverage (such as front-page articles in The West Australian or The Australian Financial Review), as brief wholesale market spikes are standard operational occurrences. Instead, coverage emerged across industry-specific platforms:

• Real-time automated alerts (July 12): Market-tracking services like gridIQ and NEM/WEM dispatch monitoring platforms immediately logged the price movements on the morning of July 12 as the five-minute dispatch intervals settled.

• Specialist energy intelligence (subsequent weeks): Detailed market commentary and research notes—such as those by Modo Energy analyzing the bidding patterns, pre-dispatch forecasts, and battery charging strategies—were published in the specialized trade and industry analysis releases shortly following the settlement and review of the event data.