Varial services 101

Start with a market view. Represent the physical system and commercial drivers: demand, existing and proposed supply, fuel and other commodity costs, network limits and interconnector flows. These assumptions determine the conditions that prices and dispatch emerge from.

Change what matters. Set up multiple scenarios around a decision. Examples include changing demand growth, delaying a generator retirement, adding supply, altering a network project or testing a commodity price. Run those scenarios across different weather years to see how demand, wind and solar conditions change the answer.

Follow the chain to the decision. Compare prices, dispatch and flows, then connect them to budgets, offtake prices, hedges, asset earnings or portfolio risk. Results are designed to be inspected, not treated as a single unquestioned number. Run times and available controls depend on the service and the scope of the analysis.

Varial Energy focuses on realistic NEM price and earnings scenarios across years 0–7. Use them for financial planning and budgeting, offtake pricing, hedging, risk limits and balancing expected portfolio earnings against downside risk. Forecasts can extend up to 30 years when a decision requires them.

Scenarios carry through to assets and positions on a consistent weather and market basis. That lets users compare a budget, a contract's exposure or a combined portfolio under the same assumptions. Outputs can include regional prices, supply and dispatch, flows, generation volumes, capture, curtailment, earnings and portfolio risk. The exact outputs depend on the analysis configured.

The service is designed for self-service use, with expert modelling support available. It is open to anyone making financial or asset decisions in the NEM.

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Varial X gives spot and forward traders and asset optimisers price forecasts up to 40 hours ahead across all five NEM regions. Those short-term prices can inform spot and current-quarter trading decisions. It adds price context around published pre-dispatch forecasts, especially when the spread and tail of possible outcomes matter.

The forecast ensemble brings together a fundamental NEM dispatch engine, statistical methods and AI models. Comparing where they agree and how far they spread helps you judge how much weight to give a forecast. Each interval shows the median, the spread and the chance of negative or high prices, not just a single number.

Every issued forecast is kept and scored. Misses and high price events are debriefed, and performance is benchmarked against matched AEMO pre-dispatch runs and comparable forecasts. Trading and dispatch decisions remain with the participant; Varial X does not provide operational autobidding.

• Billing: annual subscription.
• Places: a handful of selected participants, kept small on purpose. Most bidders, including the few autobidders, still lean on pre-dispatch. If everyone traded on the same forecast, that edge would close.
• Access: separate from Varial Energy. A Varial Energy account does not include it.

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A scenario is a conditional view: if the stated market assumptions hold, then the model produces this range of outcomes. A weather sensitivity changes those outcomes again. Compare scenarios on the same basis, keep the assumptions attached to any figure, and look at the spread as well as the central result.

Fundamental detail helps a model remain connected to real market mechanisms. It does not remove uncertainty. For Varial Energy, test decisions across alternative build, fuel, network and weather paths. For Varial X, judge a forecast on its scored track record against pre-dispatch, not on any single call.

Have a specific asset, portfolio or trading question? Tell us what you want to test →