Wholesale datasets

Dispatch energy prices

Real-time pricing was introduced in the New Zealand wholesale electricity market on 1 November 2022, resulting in a new price series - dispatch energy prices.

Dispatch energy prices are typically derived from the RTD instance of the SPD model and made available to the market in real time by the pricing manager. Occasionally the most recent PRSS (short price-responsive schedule) price will be used if no RTD price is available. And if scarcity pricing is in effect, the dispatch energy price will be derived from the RTDP (RTD for pricing) schedule.

Dispatch energy prices are produced throughout a trading period at intervals ranging from one to several minutes in duration. At the end of the trading period, interim energy prices for the trading period will be calculated as the time-weighted average of the dispatch energy prices for that period. If no pricing error claims are subsequently lodged, interim prices will be declared to be final prices by 2pm the following business day.

Dispatch energy prices are collated into a single daily CSV file, grouped by year, and made available early each morning. The file schema is as follows:

• TradingDate – the trading date to which the price refers; yyyy-mm-dd
• TradingPeriod – the trading period number to which the price refers
• PublishDateTime – the New Zealand date and time, in ISO 8601 format, when the price was published by the pricing manager
• PointOfConnection – the point of connection (POC) on the grid
• Island – Island (NI/SI)
• IsProxyPriceFlag – a Y/N flag indicating whether the price is a proxy price. Proxy prices are applied when a transmission asset outage has disconnected a POC from the grid and the price from the nearest electrically adjacent POC is used instead
• DollarsPerMegawattHour – the published dispatch energy price in dollars per megawatt-hour.