Stochastic Modeling for Future Scenarios of the 2040 Australian National Electricity Market using ANTARES

This paper focuses on future scenarios for the 2040 Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) based on stochastic modeling and optimisation using the stochastic optimization software Antares. These scenarios consider a large range of future projections including the effects of renewable energy (RE) systems, centralised and distributed energy storage, generation retirement and interstate transmission expansion. The results of this study show that compared to the current network, a centralized projection of the 2040 NEM is expected to see a 23% reduction in annual operating costs, a 62% reduction in emissions but the system is likely to suffer from reliability and spilled RE challenges. The results also show that a centralized energy storage will be valuable in managing the 2040 high RE network than small distributed energy storage sources as they will be harder to coordinate on a grid-wide scale. Finally, the study shows that transmission projects have an important role in improving RE utilization across the grid and improving reliability across the system with QNI & Marinus link upgrade show the most notable improvement in the system.