Australia power market halted in dramatic move to avert blackouts
Australia’s energy market operator took the unprecedented step on Wednesday of suspending the electricity spot market across eastern Australia to ensure it can keep the lights on, amid a string of outages at coal-fired plants.
The dramatic move came after the operator capped wholesale prices on Monday as required when they exceeded a set threshold, which led some generators to withhold supply as they could not cover their costs at the capped price of A$300 per megawatt hour (MWh).
That forced the market operator to order generators to supply 5 gigawatts (GW) of power, which they had not offered into the market on Tuesday, to avert blackouts in two states – New South Wales and Queensland.
