On 27 March 2013, the Reliability Panel (Panel) published its final report on the annual market performance review which examines the performance of the National Electricity Market (NEM) in the 2011-2012 financial year.

The final report sets out the Panel’s findings and assessments:

• In 2011-2012 there was no unserved energy (USE) due to reliability events and the average USE for all regions continued to remain within the Reliability Standard.
• Some of the power system incidents resulted in disruption to customer load, though generally the past financial year has been relatively uneventful compared to other years when more extreme weather events impacted security. There were also some incidents where frequency was outside the frequency operating standards on the mainland and in Tasmania. One of the incidents resulted in under-frequency load shedding in Tasmania.
• The Panel is not aware of any incidents where AEMO did not achieve its obligations with respect to safety in the NEM.

Background

Each year, the Reliability Panel undertakes a review under the National Electricity Rules (NER) of the performance of the NEM in terms of the reliability and security of the power system. The scope of this review is to consider the reliability, security and safety of the NEM in terms of performance against the standards and guidelines determined by the Panel under the NER.

The Panel has been conducting this annual review since 2006. The review considers the performance of the NEM bulk wholesale electricity systems. Performance at the local transmission and distribution level has also been included in the report, where this information was available.

The draft report for this review was published on 8 November 2012. It was open for consultation and no submissions were received. The Panel also held a public meeting at the AEMC office in Sydney on 13 February 2013.

As this is an annual review, the Panel will continue to consider ways in which this work may be carried out to provide more useful and meaningful information to the market.