We don’t use horoscopes to shape national energy plans, so why put so much faith in complex modelling?

Andrew Blakers has argued that complex energy models used to shape Australia's decarbonisation pathway are unreliable over medium and long timeframes, prone to large errors, and vulnerable to unforeseen events like geopolitical disruption or transmission constraints. He points to AEMO's Integrated System Plan as an example, noting that simpler, faster models exploring a wider range of "good enough" solutions would better account for uncertainty. The core claim is that detailed optimum pathways to net zero emissions in 2050 are inherently pointless to model given the cascading unknowns: future technology costs, new inventions, demand growth, political will, wars, pandemics and supply shocks.

Where this fits

This bears directly on the reliability case. Energy planners in Australia have locked the grid into a renewables-only pathway based partly on modelling that Blakers argues is too narrow and too precise for the uncertainties at play. If the ISP underestimates wind deployment barriers and overestimates the pace of firm storage solutions, the grid faces unplanned reliance on gas firming when the next crisis hits. A more robust design would hedge by keeping optionality open: the firm, long-lived, low-material alternative now banned by law, nuclear, remains foreclosed precisely because the models guiding policy are treated as maps rather than sketches.

What it means

Australia is betting its grid stability on a single architectural vision derived from models that claim precision they cannot possess. When geopolitical shock, technology failure, or demand surprise arrives, and history says one will, the grid will lack the firm, dispatchable capacity to absorb it. A grid designed to survive uncertainty would not have eliminated the lowest-emission firm power source before testing whether the modelled path holds.