The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) this week released an update to its annual assessment of reliability, the so-called Electricity Statement of Opportunities. This has been reported as the market operator forecasting “power shortages”, or the network being “at risk of supply shortages”.
The market operator has certainly put up in lights its message that there’s an “urgent need for investment in generation, long-duration storage and transmission to achieve reliability requirements over the next decade”. Yet the reliability outlook has actually improved overall since AEMO’s previous statement last August.
At first pass, this seems counterintuitive. How can reliability be improving, yet still evidently cause for grave concern?
