What's new (June 2026)
To see the change, please make sure you are on the latest version of the Amber app.
We've just made a change to the Amber app: the “Live Prices” screen now uses our Advanced Price Forecast to show you future prices, instead of AEMO's pre-dispatch forecast.
Why the change? For anyone enrolled in SmartShift, it already uses our Advanced Price Forecast to plan your battery's actions. Showing a different forecast on the Live Prices screen was getting confusing, so we've brought the two into line. What you see now matches our internal view of future prices.
Read on for more about what the Advanced Price Forecast is and how it works.
How AEMO's pre-dispatch forecasts work
AEMO's price forecasts are based on current pre-dispatch price bids.
Electricity generators (coal plants, gas plants, wind and solar farms, big batteries) submit bids to AEMO saying "we'll supply this much electricity at this price". AEMO lines those bids up from cheapest to most expensive, and the price for any given period is set by the most expensive bid needed to meet demand. The pre-dispatch forecast then shows what the price would be if the bids currently in the market stayed in place.
Forecasting wholesale prices this way is a bit like predicting a house's final auction price from the bids placed so far. It gets more accurate as more bids come in, but the early picture can be misleading.
For example, generators tend to hold their most competitive bids until the last minute. A generator might place an extremely high bid early in the day (e.g. the equivalent of $15/kWh) and lower it as the period gets closer. AEMO's forecast keeps showing that early spike for as long as the high bid is in place.
Pre-dispatch prices also don't account for market dynamics. A high forecast price can itself bring more generators online, increasing supply and pushing the actual price down. That's part of why AEMO's forecasts can show price spikes that don't actually happen.
How we generate our advanced price forecasts
Our Advanced Price Forecasts, designed in partnership with the CSIRO, are generated using a range of inputs. In addition to the pre-dispatch bids, it factors in the weather, actual demand patterns, and historical price data.
The aim is to give a more accurate picture of what future prices are likely to be, so that SmartShift can make better decisions about when to charge your battery and when to sell power back to the grid.
We already use this in the SmartShift algorithm, so we can plan better, and make smarter decisions for your battery.
Where you'll see these prices in the app
The Advanced Price Forecast now drives future prices on both the Live Prices screen and the SmartShift Plan chart on the Devices tab.
To make it easier to see what SmartShift is planning around, we still show AEMO's pre-dispatch forecast as a grey line on the SmartShift Plan chart, alongside our Advanced Forecast in pink.
A quick note on accuracy
No forecast is perfect. Wholesale electricity prices are influenced by a lot of things: weather, equipment outages, generator behaviour, and plenty more. Sometimes our forecast will get it spot on, sometimes it'll be off. The main thing is that we will keep working to improve it.
If our forecast isn't available for any reason, SmartShift and the live price screen will fall back to using AEMO's forecast so your battery keeps doing its job.
For API users
Our internal forecasts are available in the API. Look for the advancedForecast attribute.
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