AEMO’s latest Power
System Requirements reference paper outlines a range of interdependent
technical and operational needs that must be met at all times to maintain a
secure and reliable system.
This paper aims to help improve understanding of the
considerations that AEMO faces when managing electricity supply and demand
across the National Electricity Market (NEM).
As Australia’s independent power system and market operator,
AEMO needs to know what’s happening in real time, and also be able to anticipate
what’s likely to happen in the subsequent seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks,
years and even decades.
Did you know that every five minutes AEMO must ‘dispatch’
(initiate or enable) the market to meet demand and ancillary services using the
‘least-cost’ combination of generation (or demand response) available?
To do this, AEMO’s dispatch computer calculates an optimal
solution – considering a large number of variables, parameters, limits and
constraints – to respond to a security-constrained dispatch problem. Considerations
such as forecast demand and generation output, frequency and voltage limits, network
constraints, and much more.
In addition, the updated Power System Requirements paper describes
how the NEM power system is undergoing rapid changes.
This transformation underway involves a shift from a
centralised to a decentralised system, firm to variable energy sources,
synchronous to inverter-based resource generation (such a grid-scale wind and
solar farms), and the rise of active consumers. Watch AEMO’s recent NEM
transformation video which captures
the radical changes across the
electricity grid in the last 20 years.
However, the laws of physics that determine electrical flows
do not change, defining the technical attributes of the power system. These include
resource adequacy, frequency, voltage and system restoration.
Some of these technical attributes have been broken down
into easy-to-understand language in AEMO’s recent ‘energy explained’ campaign: system
strength, frequency
control, frequency
and voltage.
To consistently meet the needs of the NEM power system in the
face of major structural changes and resulting uncertainty across investment
and operational timeframes, AEMO continually works with the industry to
understand and address current and future system needs.
Two recent examples are AEMO’s 2020 Integrated
System Plan (ISP) and the Renewable
Integration Study (RIS). Together, these major reports outline an
integrated development roadmap for the NEM and what’s needed to maintain system
security in a future NEM with a high share of renewable resources.
For further information on the NEM, please access our updated
NEM
Factsheet or enrol on one of our virtual NEM Overview or Fundamentals instructor-led courses via AEMO’s Learning
Academy.