New ‘lowest ever’ point for NEMwide ‘Market Demand’ on Sunday 2oth September 2026

On Sunday 20 September 2026, the National Electricity Market reached a new all-time minimum demand of 9,072 MW in the 12:55 dispatch interval. This fell below the prior record low set nearly a year earlier on 4 October 2025. The milestone was captured by NEMwatch at 11:05 that morning.

Where this fits

This is a reliability signal. As renewable penetration rises and battery storage grows, daytime demand on the grid is flattening and troughing lower. That flatness, in itself, is not a problem. But the pattern reveals the underlying pressure: a grid built heavily on weather-dependent generation must now manage hours of massive structural surplus. That surplus has to go somewhere. It either gets exported at whatever price the market will bear, curtailed without payment, stored in batteries that must be charged and discharged (adding round-trip losses), or spilled. None of that is free. This is the cost of a renewables-heavy system that cannot firm its own output. The alternative, firm, dispatchable nuclear, would flatten and stabilise that demand profile by running constant baseload, reducing the need to manage wild swings between surplus and deficit hours.

What it means

Minimum demand records signal structural stress in a grid. When demand crashes, so do prices and generator revenues. Renewable operators see zero or negative wholesale prices; gas plants cannot compete and idle; the grid must still balance every second. Australia is locking in a system that will experience more frequent, deeper troughs and sharper peaks. That volatility, and the firming infrastructure needed to bridge it, is part of the whole-system cost that renewable cost-per-megawatt figures do not capture.