Image: Calistemon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Australian Energy Market Operator says the outlook for keeping the lights on across the eastern grid has improved, but that improvement depends on around 40 gigawatts of committed and anticipated projects, mostly wind, solar and batteries, actually getting built on time. AEMO released its 2026 Electricity Statement of Opportunities on 25 August 2026, its annual check on whether enough generation, storage and transmission is coming to meet demand over the next ten years.
What is driving the numbers
About 15 gigawatts of coal and gas generation is scheduled to retire over the next decade, and AEMO expects electricity consumption to grow by more than 40 percent as homes, businesses and industry electrify and data centre demand expands. Roughly 9.1 gigawatts of new generation and storage connected in the 2025/26 financial year alone, more than double the year before, and AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman said that pace, plus a strong project pipeline, is why the near term outlook has improved.
Two scenarios, two different pictures
AEMO runs two versions of the numbers. The optimistic one, assuming every committed, anticipated and government backed project lands on schedule, finds no reliability gaps before 2033/34 in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. The more conservative version, which builds in the delays AEMO has actually seen on recent projects, finds gaps emerging from 2030/31 in New South Wales and Victoria. That second, more cautious assessment is the one AEMO uses officially, and it is not currently forecasting a gap serious enough to trigger formal market action this decade.
Data centres are the wildcard
Data centre electricity use is forecast to grow nearly sevenfold, from about 5 terawatt hours this financial year to 34 terawatt hours by 2035/36, which would be around 13 percent of all electricity used on the grid, up from about 3 percent today. AEMO based that on 225 known data centre projects, though it notes more than 40 percent of proposed projects since 2025 have already dropped out of the pipeline or gone backwards.
- About 15GW of coal and gas generation is scheduled to retire over the next decade
- Electricity consumption is forecast to grow more than 40 percent as homes, businesses and industry electrify
- 9.1GW of new generation and storage connected in 2025/26, more than double the year before
- Data centre electricity use is projected to grow from about 5TWh to 34TWh by 2035/36
The evibe take
The headline is reassuring, but the fine print is doing the work. AEMO's improved outlook rests on a large slice of projects that have not fully locked in yet. Strip those out and the market operator would already be flagging reliability concerns around the end of the decade. For households the message has not changed: rooftop solar and home batteries keep loosening the daytime numbers, but firming supply for winter evenings and a coming data centre boom is still an open question the market has not answered.