How the NEM actually dispatches power every five minutes
288. That’s how many times a day AEMO’s dispatch engine re-solves the entire National Electricity Market, picks a price, and tells generators what to do. Not once an hour. Not once a half-hour, which is how it used to work until 2021. Every five minutes, around the clock, for every one of the five mainland […]
Victoria’s SEC revival meets its offshore wind test
$1 billion. That’s the seed capital Victorians voted to hand back to a publicly owned generator in 2022, resurrecting the State Electricity Commission three decades after Jeff Kennett sold the last of it off. Fast forward to October 2026 and the SEC has a stake in a big battery near Melbourne, a renewable energy fund […]
AGL Energy: the biggest gentailer’s awkward middle act
Around 4,600 megawatts. That’s roughly the combined nameplate of Loy Yang A and Bayswater, the two coal stations still carrying most of AGL Energy’s generation book, and the number that every other decision this company makes gets measured against. AGL is the biggest gentailer in the National Electricity Market by generation capacity and by customer […]
Has the gas industry been written off too early?
Eight gigawatts. That’s roughly how much new gas-fired peaking capacity AEMO’s Integrated System Plan still has pencilled into the optimal development path for the National Electricity Market out to 2050, even in the step-change scenario that assumes renewables do almost everything else. Eight gigawatts in a market whose entire public conversation for three years has […]
Does Australia actually need nuclear power?
Zero. That’s how many commercial nuclear reactors are under construction in Australia right now, and how many have ever operated for grid power in this country. Compare that to roughly 40 gigawatts of wind, solar and storage capacity either built or contracted through state schemes and the Commonwealth’s own tender process, and you start to […]
Is rooftop solar quietly breaking the grid?
Nineteen gigawatts of rooftop solar capacity sat on Australian roofs by the Clean Energy Regulator’s last count, and the figure keeps climbing by roughly three gigawatts a year. That’s not a rounding error on a grid built to run on coal and gas. It’s a second power system, owned by three million-odd households and businesses, […]
The CIS tender clock: what it shuts out, and who it favours
32 gigawatts. That’s the target capacity the Commonwealth’s Capacity Investment Scheme is meant to underwrite by 2030, split roughly across dispatchable storage and renewables, and the tender rounds run so far have already allocated a meaningful chunk of it. The scheme was sold as a neutral backstop, a way of smoothing revenue risk so projects […]
The Safeguard Mechanism’s heavy industry test gets harder
215 facilities. That’s roughly how many industrial sites now sit under the Safeguard Mechanism’s baseline-and-credit system, covering a bit under a third of Australia’s total emissions from a list that reads like a who’s who of steel, alumina, LNG and cement. Every one of them is now required to cut emissions intensity by 4.9 per […]
Coal exits versus replacement builds: who’s actually ahead
Four gigawatts. That’s roughly the scheduled coal capacity due to leave the NEM between now and 2030 across Eraring, Yallourn and Loy Yang A, against a transmission queue that, on AEMO’s own numbers, is still waiting on several major Renewable Energy Zone links to reach financial close. Put those two facts next to each other […]
State renewable targets compared: the honest scorecard
82 per cent. That’s the renewable share South Australia’s grid has been running at on an annual basis for a while now, and it sits there as the awkward benchmark every other state gets measured against whether it likes it or not. Tasmania claims it got to 100 per cent years ago, on paper, through […]