If you’ve just checked the Flick app and discovered an unreliable price message, things are a little askew in the land of spot price electricity! But it’s nothing to worry about.
The electricity market is just encountering a wee blip, also known as ‘infeasible pricing’, where, for some reason (usually thanks to an outage somewhere), the system that generates spot prices every half hour doesn’t have all the info it requires to give us a reliable spot price for that period.
It’s worth knowing that under market management rules, in normal market conditions the spot price shouldn’t actually go above 1000 cents per kWh. So as soon as we see it rise above this, we suspect that the market’s presenting us with infeasible pricing. Sort of like an ‘FYI’ for those in the industry. So that’s what we show you on the price dial.
If you follow a secondary source of pricing information, such as WITS, their website may display pricing over and above the 1000 cent threshold set for the Flick app, but, like we’ve mentioned, it’s actually really unlikely the market will settle above 1000 cents.
We know all this leaves you with a gap in your information – and knowledge is power! – but as a general rule, when we can’t display a reliable price based on the data we receive, the actual price is usually the same as the half hour either side of it.
So grab yourself a cuppa, lower that heart rate and carry on, #CleverFlickers!
For more on the lifecycle of electricity prices, check out our blog, Forecast to Final Prices.