Nexa Advisory Submission – AEMO Draft 2025 IASR Stage 2
Nexa Advisory welcomes the opportunity to share our views and insights on AEMO’s Draft 2025 Inputs, Assumptions and Scenarios Report (IASR) Stage 2.
The Integrated System Plan (ISP) remains a critical planning and system design roadmap for the National Electricity Market (NEM) and a vital tool which informs investors, policy makers and broader industry as we progress Australia’s clean energy transition. However, given recent contention around this roadmap, there is a clear need for AEMO to improve the robustness of its modelling to deliver a high conviction forward view of the energy system and ensure the lowest-cost pathway to achieve this.
It has become clear that more robust assessment of future states of the world is needed in the ISP – through its Methodology, scenarios, and inputs and assumptions. We consider there are two key areas where this is most needed, and suggest:
- Alternative coal retirement sensitivities must reduce uncertainty – the inclusion of alternative coal retirement schedule (as proposed in the Draft IASR Stage 2) does nothing to address the fundamental issues around disorderly coal exit in the NEM. Rather than framing this sensitivity as exploring ‘alternative retirement’, we consider the purpose of this sensitivity should be to highlight the cost of disorderly coal exit.
- Alternative Consumer Energy Resources (CER) uptake sensitivity – we support the inclusion of alternative CER uptake sensitivity to explore greater uptake of these resources, in lieu of the ISP Methodology allowing for the co-optimisation of CER and demand-side factors.
- Hydrogen forecasts – given the significant scale and high level of uncertainty around hydrogen growth – even under a more conservative outlook compared to the previous ISP – we encourage AEMO to focus on minimising uncertainty and increasing the conviction around this demand forecast.
Read our submission here: Nexa Advisory – IASR Stage 2 submission
