NEMLink: Augmenting the Australian National Electricity Market Transmission Grid to Facilitate Increased Wind Turbine Generation and Its Effect on Transmission Congestion

This report compares the effect of increasing the number of wind turbine generators on transmission line congestion in the Australian National Electricity Market’s (NEM) under the existing transmission grid and an augmented version of the transmission grid called NEMLink (AEMO 2010a, 2010b, 2011a, 2011b). The comparison is made from 2014 to 2025. We use a sensitivity analysis to compare the effect of five different levels of wind penetration on transmission congestion in the original NEM grid and NEMLink augmented grid. The five levels of wind penetration span Scenarios A to E where Scenario A represents ‘no wind’ and Scenario E includes all the existing and planned wind power sufficient to meet Australia’s original 2020 41TWh Large Renewable Energy Target (LRET). We also use sensitivity analysis to evaluate the effect on transmission congestion of growth in electricity demand over the projections years 2014 to 2025 and weather over the years 2010 to 2012. The sensitivity analysis uses simulations from the ‘Australian National Electricity Market (ANEM) model version 1.10’ (Wild et al. 2015).