Case study · Amber Electric · Monday 12 October 2026
On Monday afternoon NSW feed-in prices on Amber jumped from a few cents to $24.82 per kWh. Every NSW home SolanIQ actively manages was exporting from its battery at full power — an estimated $34 to $77 per home in 90 minutes.
The afternoon, 5 minutes at a time
Amber’s settled NSW feed-in price, above, against the grid export of one SolanIQ-managed home with a 6 kW ESY HM6 inverter, below. Times are AEDT.
Why it spiked
Heat alone didn’t do it. Three things lined up, and the NSW wholesale price hit $23,107/MWh (just under the $23,200 cap) in two 5-minute intervals from 15:15.
Sydney’s Observatory Hill reached 34.7°C, about 10°C hotter than Sunday, and Sydney Airport hit 35.3°C. As cloud built through the afternoon, NSW rooftop solar dropped from 5.8 GW at noon to 2.4 GW by 16:00, 2 GW below Sunday at the same time. Grid demand rose from about 5,700 MW to 8,200 MW by 15:30.
Eraring units 1 and 3 were on unplanned outage, and Bayswater 3 and Mt Piper 2 on planned outage: four of NSW’s twelve coal units. The rest were ramping up from low midday output when demand surged.
Imports from Queensland were capped at 500 MW, and the new link to South Australia had been out since Sunday. NSW network limits held back supply from the south, and wind farms were curtailed to about a third of what they could produce.
AEMO declared no actual lack of reserve and no load was shed. Times are AEDT. Sources: AEMO NEMWeb dispatch, rooftop PV and market notices; BoM observations; WattClarity on the spike, coal availability and the SA interconnector outage.
How it was done
From 14:35, with feed-in paying 7 to 23 cents, SolanIQ stopped exporting and kept the energy in the battery instead of selling it cheap.
From 15:05 the battery exported at the inverter’s 5 kW limit while Amber’s 5-minute feed-in price sat between $10 and $25 per kWh.
Owners didn’t watch the market or open the app. The optimiser re-plans every 5 minutes and acted on its own — in every NSW home we actively manage.
The honest fine print: earnings are estimates at Amber’s settled 5-minute prices; what each home actually receives depends on its tariff, battery and inverter. Spikes like this don’t happen every day — but when they do, an automated battery is the one that catches them.
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