The Justice and Equity Centre made a submission to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) consultation regarding the Draft Inputs and Assumptions Report (IASR) – Stage 2.
The IASR is a key planning document and input to the Integrated System Plan (ISP). A central task of the IASR is defining the scenarios – future states of the world – under which different candidate pathways for electricity network development will be tested in the ISP.
We argued that while the ambitious scenario, ‘Green Energy’, was implausible, one if its variants could be resuscitated. This could be done by lowering the levels of hydrogen consumption and carbon sequestration in Green Energy and offsetting these changes with much more aggressive, but plausible, assumptions regarding electrification and energy efficiency, and assuming technological breakthroughs to continue occurring in the areas of storage and energy efficiency.
As we try to thread the narrow path of decarbonising the Australian economy as quickly and efficiently as possible, it is important not only to retain ambition in planning (and so retain an ambitious scenario), but also to ensure that planning is based on robust and plausible assumptions.
