South Australia

South Australia is the SA1 region of the National Electricity Market, a long, thinly connected grid at the western edge of the system. The page shows AEMO’s five-minute spot price and regional demand. It is among the most weather-driven regions in this clock, because it has no coal generation to lean on and relies on wind, solar and gas, plus links to Victoria that can become the binding limit.

Two things make South Australia different from the other NEM pages. First, prices can swing hard in both directions. Windy, sunny, mild days with low demand push the spot price negative, because generators with subsidies or low must-run costs keep producing, while calm evenings can send prices to the top of the range when imports are constrained. Second, the local time is unusual: Adelaide uses UTC+9.5 as its standard time and its clocks move an hour ahead in summer, while NEM time is AEST, ten hours ahead of UTC, so it is offset from NEM market time at all times.

Rooftop solar is large relative to demand and sits behind the meter, so the demand line approximates what the grid serves rather than what the state consumes. We do not show a generation mix.

Limitations: a dispatch price can still be revised in rare cases, a negative value is genuine rather than an error, and no figure here is a forecast. Our quality filter rejects only values far beyond the known price limits.