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Enhanced AEMO Dataset Documentation

AEMO publish a lot of information about Australia's electricity market. This site is for industry participants and researchers who want to analyse that data.

Fortunately there is far more public data available for this sector than almost any other industry, or even any other country's electricity market. Unfortunately there are many undocumented aspects of the data which can trip up newcomers, and many details that even experts need to look up frequently.

What this website offers

There are two main sections:

  • Guide: Intermediate and detailed explanations of how the data, the grid and the market work.
  • Schema: The official documentation for AEMO's datasets is lacking. This site takes that documentation, adds in information from other AEMO sources, corrects mistakes, neatens it, makes it searchable, and includes additional warnings, code samples, links and other helpful tidbits.

Already an expert?

If you already query MMS tables every day and want to know whether this site has anything to offer you:

  • Check out the page for a particular table, e.g. the BIDDAYOFFER table. Is there anything you didn't know, or anything that would be time-consuming to find out another way?

  • Search for something in the search bar above. e.g. "constraints"

Hopefully the enhancements are self-evident to a seasoned NEM nerd. If not, they are listed here.

This site is not officially affiliated with AEMO. I'm just someone who has been in the industry long enough to know how to work with this data, who wants to help others do the same.

Scope and Alternative Resources

This site is for people who want to dive deep into the data, spending hours performing bespoke analysis, mostly for queries which require data on a timescale smaller than 1 day. If you're a researcher or pundit, before you spend any time on this, first check whether you can quickly obtain the data you want from Open Electricity. Other high-level statistics are available from the AEMO Data Dashboard and the IEA. With those sources you can quickly answer questions like:

  • What is the current fuel mix (i.e. % coal, % solar etc), and how has that changed over time?
  • How much CO2 was emitted last year?
  • What is the volume-weighted average price of gridscale solar last month?
  • What is the spot price of electricity right now?

If you want to answer something more bespoke and complex, this site explains how. This site also includes a quick overview of the design of the market, and some acronyms and terms which newcomers will not be familiar with. I do not expect anyone to read this from top to bottom. Rather, you should read the first few sections, then skim the rest, using ctrl-f or an LLM to find relevant content.

This site is only about Australia's NEM, not the WEM (Western Australia), and not the Northern Territory. This is about electricity, not gas.

Quickstart