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Data scope

What data is available?

Australia's National Electricity Market (NEM) includes Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, and South Australia. The market is operated by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). (Typically "AEMO" is used in sentences on its own, instead of "the AEMO". They do not even refer to themselves with "the".) The NEM does not include Western Australia or the Northern Territory. Those are separate grids, with separate data. The Western Australia Market (WEM) is also operated by AEMO, but the market rules, data schemas and data pipelines are different. This post is focused on Australia's NEM, and the data in the "Market Management System" (MMS) dataset.

The publicly available MMS data is very comprehensive. If you have experience with data from other electricity markets/grids, you will be pleasantly surprised by how much data there is. If you are an academic with a research question, and you have not yet chosen a particular grid, you should probably just choose Australia because the data availability is so good.

The data includes:

  • Prices (every 5 minutes)
  • Price forecasts (every 5 minutes, for the next few 5 minute intervals, and less granular forecasts up to 2 days in advance)
  • Total energy generated/consumed, every 5 minutes
  • Energy generated, per generator, per 5 minutes (also 4 second granularity if you need it)
  • Detailed fuel type of each generator (so you can calculate energy, revenue, capture price etc grouped by fuel type)
  • Transmission flows between regions
  • CO2 emissions, per generator or per region, at a daily level
  • Raw bids and rebids of each generator, including a category and sentence justifying each bid
  • Constraints: AEMO does not just intersect supply and demand curves. Australia's grid is far more constrained than most, so AEMO's optimiser, the "NEM Dispatch Engine" (NEMDE) incorporates hundreds of constraints for system strength, transmission line capacity etc. The definition and evaluation of these is in the data.
  • Ancillary services: These are defined below. The data includes bids, and how much capacity is made available each period, per generator and in aggregate. Finding out how much was used is difficult, but possible.

You can estimate the energy revenue of each generator. The exact invoice amount each participant is paid is not public. (Generators are paid for their energy, but they also pay a wide range of fees, e.g. for wind/solar forecast inaccuracies.) You can estimate this amount to within a few percent. However doing so requires a great deal of expertise, which is beyond the scope of this post. Estimating just energy revenue/cost is straightforward.

The MMS dataset does not include information about green products such as Australia carbon credit units (ACCUs). For that data you will need to search elsewhere.

This dataset also does not include any information about the cost incurred by each generator, only their output and revenue. For estimates of costs, you can look at the CSIRO's GenCost model , or AEMO's System Plan.

Most data is published publicly every 5 minutes. Some sets of commercially sensitive data are published with a deliberate delay of a few days (e.g. bids). The online dataset goes back to 2009, although some tables within that do not go back as far.