Forecast prices

Forecast prices are prepared and published on WITS by the pricing manager according to the provisions set out in Part 13 of the Code.  Prices from selected schedules are made available here for analysis and research purposes.

Price files published during any given day are compressed into a zip file, by forecast price type, and uploaded to EMI datasets in a single batch job early in the morning of the following day. The zipped up CSV price files are presented as is where is, ie we do not transform the data or in any other way reformulate it from that which WITS published. We do, however, slightly revise the CSV file naming convention.

The naming convention for the CSV files is <PriceType>YYYYMMDDhhmmdd.csv where:

• <PriceType> denotes the price type, ie PRSL, NRSL, PRSS and NRSS
• YYYYMMDD is the date of the first trading period found in the file
• hhmmdd is the run time of the schedule (see 'Run time' in column description below).

The CSV files contain six columns and have no header row. Taken in order, the columns are:

• Point of connection, eg HAY2201
• Trading date - dd/mm/yyyy
• Trading period - an integer from 1 to 50
• Price ($/MWh) - number(8,2)
• Run time - dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss, ie the time at which the SPD model was run to generate the prices
• Price type - a 1-character label denoting the schedule or price type: A for PRSS, G for PRSL, N for NRSS and L for NRSL.

At this time, all forecast prices except those emanating from the weekly dispatch schedule (WDS) are made available dating back to 20 October 2018.