The comments by Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Daniel Westerman were quickly described by Resources Minister Keith Pitt as "complete nonsense".

At the same time, Mr Westerman says there's a place for the proposed Kurri Kurri gas turbine, which was criticised yesterday by the activist PR agency Climate Media Centre, which is promoting the work of a Monash University academic specialising in electricity markets, Dr Ross Gawler.

Reports in national media yesterday quoted Dr Gawler as saying his modelling showed the Snowy Hydro plant losing $150 million a year for 20 years, or $3 billion in total.

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Dr Gawler later told the Newcastle Herald that he was not entirely opposed to the Kurri plant. As well as the modelled losses - which he said were a surprise - he acknowledged it would likely have a slight impact in reducing wholesale power prices, but at a price of extra carbon dioxide emissions.

Snowy Hydro has critiqued Dr Gawler's findings with a detailed breakdown of the market as it sees it. As well, Snowy Hydro chief executive Paul Broad has told the Newcastle Herald he fears the energy market is being hijacked by "woke" sentiment and "wishful thinking".

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Mr Broad said the energy transition was inevitable and under way but coal still produced two-thirds of the power in the National Electricity Market (NEM).

He said gas generators including Kurri would be needed for years to come because of the sheer amount of storage capacity that will be needed to run the grid at night when solar panels did not operate.

"Batteries will play a role, but the heavy lifting will be done by Snowy Hydro, pumped hydro, gas and demand management - businesses like Tomago Aluminium voluntarily reducing their power use," Mr Broad said.

There is movement on the battery front, however, with the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) unveiling new market rules today that it says will make it easier for batteries to integrate with the grid.

The commission's chair, Anna Collyer, says the commission's new draft energy storage plan cuts red tape so that batteries would not have to register twice - to draw energy from the grid as well as send it out- as they were currently required to do.

"For small customers, this will open up opportunities to earn more revenue for their home battery, because they can sign up with innovative new aggregator businesses who will pay them for using their battery at certain times," Ms Collyer said.

"At the moment, aggregator businesses can only provide energy one way, but our changes will open up new business models for them."

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As a sign of how long it would take for the NEM to gain sufficient storage capacity - pumped hydro is the other proposal, next to batteries - Ms Collyer said "installed storage" would be "central to energy flowing both ways", but it would take "two decades" for capacity to increase "by 800 per cent", or eight-fold.

As market operator, the AEMO publishes a real-time "NEM data dashboard" that allows the public to see various parameters including differing measures of price and demand, and the mix of fuels being used to generate power.

Yesterday, the AEMO graphs showed batteries had provided 2471 megawatt-hours of power in the week to June 3, compared with 1.77 million megawatt-hours from black coal.

Asked how the AEMC saw the task of building sufficient battery capacity, it said: "Our rule changes are facilitating the transition to the decarbonisation of our energy system.

"We need to make sure we have the right balance of services to maintain a secure power system.

"2000 MW of retired coal [for example] does not necessarily require 2000 MW of additional storage, we just need enough storage or other such dispatchable resources to fill in the gaps from renewables.

"New ultra-fast systems services markets as well as changes under integrating storage help to encourage such resources into the system."

On AEMO chief Daniel Westerman's call for 100 per cent renewable penetration by 2025, AEMC said: "AEMO is rightly highlighting the pace of change and that is something we are very focused on too. We'd agree that change is already here in that 100 per cent renewable generation has already occurred in South Australia."

At the same time, the AEMO dashboard shows gas providing between 25 per cent and 68 per cent of SA's power over the past 12 months.

Dr Gawler, who has worked in the Victorian power industry and written various academic and technical papers on the NEM, said he was confident the grid would be capable of operating without coal or gas under its current structure and market design, although some tweaking would be needed.

But there would be enough battery capacity introduced to provide the short-term storage needed, through a mixture of home and battery farms, much as the way the solar market had developed.

Dr Gawler said he expected pumped hydro would have a greater role to play in managing long-term seasonal storage issues, when, for example, solar was unable to generate as much in winter as in summer.

In his speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia in Melbourne yesterday, AEMO's Mr Westerman said the strain was already being felt in grid control rooms around the country, with staff intervening almost every day to maintain grid security.

Mr Westerman, who began in May, said gas, including the proposed Kurri plant, would continue to play an important role in the network - a comment in line with Mr Pitt, who said the grid would need backing up "by gas and other means".

Australia is regarded as leading the world in renewable power generation on a population basis, with an explosion of large scale solar farms and a reported 55,000 megawatts of new capacity proposed for the east coast.

"This is uncharted territory for a large, independent grid anywhere in the world," Mr Westerman said.

See the AEMO dashboard here

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