AEMO Q3 Data: Batteries Beat Gas in NEM Evening Peak, 8% vs 5.1%

For storage owners the numbers cut both ways. Batteries are lowering the evening prices they earn from, the same pattern Voltgrid reported in Bulgaria, where falling price spreads threaten revenues. The Energy noted that volatility stayed subdued across the quarter.

New Demand High as Data Center Load Grows

Average underlying NEM demand reached a new high, up 1.3% on the previous third-quarter record set in 2025, AEMO said, as electrification, industrial load and data centers offset milder winter weather. The Energy reported that data center demand in Victoria almost doubled quarter on quarter to 225 MW, and that the number of data center projects in AEMO's implementation phase doubled to 10, representing 3.2 GW of upcoming demand. Operational demand, which is demand met from the grid, edged down 0.2% year over year.

Gas has not left the system, even as Voltgrid News reported earlier on Wood Mackenzie's 4-hour battery versus gas peaker comparison. The Energy reported that gas set the price in Western Australia's wholesale market after a major wind farm outage and a 17% fall in coal output, and that black coal generation in the NEM hit a new third-quarter low. Gas also flowed north from Moomba into Queensland for the first third quarter since 2016.

What the AEMO Figures Do Not Confirm Yet

The figures here come from OilPrice.com and The Energy summarising the AEMO report; Voltgrid could not open AEMO's own page, which blocked automated access. Bloomberg, which first flagged the story, is paywalled. Neither report gives the installed battery capacity in MW or MWh, so the size of the tripling is not stated. Whether the new data center load will be served partly by storage is also not addressed in those reports.