23/07/2026
A closer examination of the modelling choices, excluded costs and predetermined assumptions behind AEMO’s preferred energy pathway.
The 2026 Integrated System Plan does not demonstrate that Australia’s complete electricity transition is the lowest-cost option for consumers. It identifies the preferred pathway only after government policies, committed projects, demand forecasts and major infrastructure decisions have been fixed within the modelling.
Billions of dollars in committed and anticipated projects are excluded from headline costs, while consumer-funded technologies and gas infrastructure provide benefits without being fully included in the system cost. The result is a technically sophisticated but narrowly framed plan whose conclusions depend heavily on assumptions that are insufficiently transparent or independently tested.
The greatest flaw is not a single erroneous equation. It is the cumulative effect of decisions about what is fixed, what is optimised, what is excluded, what is annualised, what is assumed to eventuate, and which uncertainties are allowed to challenge the answer.
A genuinely transparent ISP would publish a project-by-project reconciliation of all unfinished infrastructure, rerun the system without each major assumed project, co-optimise demand-side and grid-scale alternatives, show total consumer-funded expenditure, test severe non-recovery delivery cases, and report results without subjective scenario weighting.
Until that exists, the ISP should be read as AEMO’s preferred pathway within an increasingly predetermined policy and infrastructure architecture, not independent proof that the entire architecture is economically optimal.
Transmission Could Deliver a Clean Energy Future if the Right Solutions were Deployed A closer examination of the modelling choices, excluded costs and predetermined assumptions behind AEMO’s preferred energy pathway The 2026 ISP is not a clean-sheet, whole-of-system assessment of the cheapest way...
