A market-wide view of battery economics in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM): is the grid-scale battery fleet starting to cannibalise its own revenue? Where the rest of NEMPulse is per-battery, this page aggregates the whole fleet — the intraday two-hour price spread by region, the offered energy and capacity coming online, the perfect-foresight arbitrage opportunity, and the correlation between storage online and the spread it feeds on. Every series is recomputed weekly from AEMO data and exposed through a documented API with a CSV download, so the figures are reproducible rather than decorative.
As of July 2026, the average intraday two-hour spot-price spread is $82/MWh in New South Wales (down 45% year-on-year); $96/MWh in Queensland (down 34.7% year-on-year); $104/MWh in South Australia (down 60.2% year-on-year); $107/MWh in Victoria (down 42.6% year-on-year) — a broad compression across the NEM consistent with revenue cannibalisation as a growing battery fleet competes for the same arbitrage.
As more storage comes online, does the spread it arbitrages shrink — battery revenue cannibalisation, the storage analogue of solar value deflation? Across the NEM mainland regions the two-hour price spread has compressed over the past year, but not uniformly — the peak-vs-trough chart below breaks down which end of the day is moving in each region. There is a negative correlation between fleet storage online and the spread, but because both trend over time, NEMPulse also publishes a first-difference test that removes the shared time trend. That differenced test is the honest causal check, and it gains statistical power as more data arrives. This page shows both side by side and asserts neither conclusion — it states what the data shows now.
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