EUAA Submission: NSW Transmission Planning Review – Option Paper
Emily Wood | May 16, 2025
‘… The transition to a low carbon energy system is proving to be exponentially more challenging than was first anticipated, even more so in NSW as the Roadmap seeks to accelerate the largest transformation in the NEM. From our experience, the planning and coordination of multiple entities involved in the transition is difficult to engage with. Many stakeholders find it confusing to understand which entity is responsible and therefore accountable for each of the required tasks. Based on our extensive experience, the planning and coordination aspect of the roadmap is well below what we would consider to be best practice. As such, the NSW transition is costing more than it should with near zero transparency for consumers on the potential impacts on their electricity bills, creating an unknown tsunami of future network related costs that consumers are ill-prepared for.
Part of the problem is NSW’s focus on being a significant net exporter of renewable energy as opposed to ensuring there is sufficient volumes of energy to meet the needs of NSW consumers with an ability to export an efficient number of electrons, recognising that other jurisdictions are embarking on their own decarbonisation journey and seeking a high degree of energy independence. The approach to date in NSW focusses on maximising the number of renewable energy installations and therefore tends to prioritise renewable developers over consumers. We fear this will lead to a significant overbuild of assets in NSW, adding additional costs to NSW energy users.
This approach is exacerbated by a general lack of forward-facing planning in the NEM. Forward-facing planning is where planners would start from a vision of a 2050 electricity network and work backwards to what is required today to meet demand and system security, rather than the current approach that models what is needed at the next target date, being 2030…’
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