Executive General Manager WA and Strategy Kirsten Rose, 11 November 2025
Good morning everyone,
I also acknowledge the traditional owners of this beautiful land that we’re on, the Whadjuk Nyoongar people, and pay my respects to Elders past and present.
I also acknowledge the traditional owners as our first engineers in Australia, which is an important part of the contribution that they have made and continue to make in our community.
Thank you Laurie for inviting me to join you today.
It is wonderful to be here to talk about how AEMO is working with our partners to empower Western Australia’s clean energy future.
As Laurie said, I have very recently stepped into the role of Executive General Manager WA and Strategy at AEMO, just a little over two months ago.
So I’m still very new, but I’m actually not new to WA. I have been here for over 20 years and my connection to WA’s energy sector goes back a long time.
It is absolutely terrific to be back in the thick of it and contributing to AEMO at this incredibly important time in the transition, because AEMO occupies such an important and unique role across the country and certainly here in WA.
As we’ve heard, AEMO operates the SWIS (the South West Interconnected System) and WEM (the Wholesale Electricity Market) balancing supply and demand in real-time, in the interests of WA consumers.
We are an enabler of Australia’s energy transition.
Our role means it is critically important for us to collaborate, with the organisations represented on this panel and more widely across industry, governments and researchers around Australia.
As the system and market operator, AEMO also works with international counterparts and brings those insights to our work here in WA, across a range of technical and market related matters.
We are really lucky to have that international and national experience at AEMO and a really broad view of the energy transition.
I'm confident in saying that both the challenges and the opportunities in the transition look a lot more similar than different on both sides of our great continent.
Ageing coal plants are retiring and as they do so, the lowest cost way to replace their energy is to invest in renewable generation, firmed by storage, backed up by gas and supported through network investment.
That stands across the NEM and WEM.
Having said that on the energy front WA is special, because it is the world’s largest isolated grid and because we are seeing a lot of these changes in the transition, if not first, very early and certainly very, very intensely here in WA.
The scale and speed of the transition in the West is truly remarkable.
10 years ago, almost 90 per cent of WA’s electricity was generated by burning coal and gas.
Compare that to last Monday, when the SWIS set a new renewable contribution record of almost 89%.
At the time, rooftop solar was powering more than 64% of the SWIS’ needs, while wind contributed 16.19%, grid-scale solar 4.67%, hybrid (battery plus solar) 2.21%, biomass (waste-to-energy) 1.5% and batteries 0.32%.
It reflects an energy transition that is absolutely well underway, with consumers right at the heart of it.
More than 40% of WA households now have rooftop solar – one of the highest uptake rates in the world – with around 30,000 new systems installed each year.
Across Australia, significant work is underway on how best to integrate these distributed energy resources into the grid, because that will result in a lower cost grid for everyone.
In this respect, the West is leading the way.
Turbo-charged by the combined effect of the WA Residential Battery Scheme and the Commonwealth Home Battery Scheme, WA is embracing distributed energy resources and the development of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs).
I don’t want to repeat what Sam had to say – nor do I want to steal Mike Bradford’s thunder for his presentation later today on Project Jupiter and acceleration of VPPs in the SWIS – but I do want to stress the importance of this project.
AEMO is very proud to be collaborating in Project Jupiter, and of the part we played in its award-winning precursor, Project Symphony.
The vision of Project Jupiter is to develop Australia’s first energy system and market where distributed energy resources are safely and securely integrated at scale for the benefit of the community.
It is genuinely nation leading, with benefits for consumers, for the network and the system as a whole, as well as supporting WA on its pathway to net zero.
Another place where WA is demonstrating significant leadership in policy, systems and engineering is with the very high penetration of utility scale batteries, with more on the way.
Since 2023, more than 800 megawatts of battery storage has been added, and another 500 megawatts will be commissioned over the summer.
These batteries are playing multiple roles in the WA grid.
They act as load during periods of low system demand but also to help flatten the duck curve in the evening when all that solar starts disappearing.
These batteries are changing the system – our control rooms have said to me they are game-changing - and pointing the way to the future.
But there are challenges facing both NEM and WEM.
As far as reliability is concerned, AEMO’s reports show that in the NEM, a strong investment pipeline exists for generation and storage projects; strong enough to meet reliability standards if it is delivered on time and in full.
Here in WA, June’s Wholesale Electricity Market Statement of Opportunities noted that over the last few years, strong investment, particularly in battery storage, has helped alleviate previously forecast risks to reliability in the state’s main power system.
Looking forward, ongoing investment in generation and storage will be required to manage growing peak demand and offset power station retirements.
Both NEM and WEM face challenges when it comes to system security services.
System strength is a major challenge, particularly understanding how minimum fault current and black start services can be provided in a system dominated by inverter-based resources such as wind, solar and batteries.
AEMO is working collaboratively with Western Power, in particular, on these issues and also with the government.
The Power System Security and Reliability Standards Review currently in consultation with Energy Policy WA is really important work in this space.
In solving this for the SWIS, there are several things to be mindful of.
The SWIS isn’t interconnected, so it must be self-reliant.
The WEM has a capacity market, the NEM is an energy-only market.
But the laws of physics do remain the same, and AEMO is looking closely at how we can leverage learning from the NEM on how to operate a system with 100% instantaneous renewable generation.
I’d like to shift gears a little bit, and reflect on one thing that hasn’t really come up today.
In my two months in this role, I've been working hard to get up to speed on all the technical challenges and opportunities in the WA system and the energy sector more broadly.
One thing has really jumped out at me since I've been in the role is just how critically important workforce is for all of us in this sector.
It is an issue for the energy transition nationwide – and I would argue globally - but it is particularly acute here in Western Australia, where AUKUS, the development of naval shipbuilding, and projected ongoing growth and expansion of the mining industry are turbo-charging demand for many of the same skills we need in the energy transition.
Government is certainly leaning in with a range of skill-building initiatives, and AEMO is leveraging our workforce where appropriate nationwide to support technical work needed for WA. But building the transition workforce so that we deliver the best outcomes for WA consumers will also require concerted effort from every stakeholder in the electricity industry – including EESA itself.
My colleague Nicola Falcon, AEMO’s EGM for System Design, has a really strong appreciation of these issues, and that will underly her contribution to the panel tomorrow afternoon on women in energy and engineering.
I started my remarks today by talking about how special I think our state is.
So I want to conclude on that note, by focusing on the incredible opportunity in front of us.
Lots of people have asked me why I joined the energy transition at this point, and I’ve said “because it's the most exciting point”.
The next five years are going be incredibly hard and interesting and have the power to completely transform our entire economy, and that's a pretty exciting challenge. And again, we need to collaborate as a sector to power our WA economy through that transition to provide reliable, low, or zero emissions electricity because we do have some of the nation's most important economic endeavours in this state. Those things include the resources industry, but also data centres, the rare earth extraction and processing industry, electrification of the economy overall, off-grid electricity for all kinds of purposes, communities, and industrial decarbonization.
If you look back at the 100-year proud history of EESA, you'll see many instances in which EESA's membership, either individually or collectively, were really instrumental in collaborating to solve those big challenges in the state's advancement.
So thank you for your help and your support and your solutions and your innovation. At this time, it's absolutely critical and I’m really keen to hear any insights that you have today.
Thank you.