Beyond Your Day Job: Seeing the Bigger Power System at API Summer School

One of the challenges of working in the power sector is that it can be easy to become an expert in one part of an increasingly interconnected system.

Yet as professionals progress into leadership roles, understanding the bigger picture becomes increasingly important. Decisions about networks, generation, markets, policy, customers, communities and investment rarely happen in isolation. This broader perspective is a key part of the API Summer School experience. At the 2026 Summer School, AEMO Group Manager Eli Pack took participants behind the scenes of one of the most significant planning exercises in Australia’s electricity sector: the Integrated System Plan (ISP).

Rather than simply explaining what is in the ISP, Eli explored how a plan of this scale is developed and the complexity involved in planning an electricity system undergoing extraordinary change.

From a stable system to transformation

Drawing on almost 20 years at AEMO, Eli reflected on just how dramatically the sector has changed. Australia’s electricity system has relied on coal generation for more than a century. Today, the National Electricity Market has already experienced periods where renewable energy supplied around 78.6% of electricity, with the possibility of periods of 100% renewable operation moving closer. The scale of what comes next is significant.

Eli explained that the ISP forecasts approximately four times today's rooftop solar capacity and five times the current utility-scale renewable generation by 2050. Around 6,000 additional kilometres of transmission is expected to complement the NEM's existing 44,000 kilometres, alongside major investment in batteries, pumped hydro and firming capacity. But the presentation demonstrated that planning this transition involves much more than determining how much generation or transmission needs to be built.

Eli Pack Day 1 Summer School 2026

The power system is a system of interconnected decisions

Eli challenged Summer School participants to consider a deceptively simple scenario: imagine one town supplied by one ageing coal-fired power station and transmission line. If both assets are approaching retirement, what would you need to know to plan the town's future electricity supply? Very quickly, the room identified a long list of considerations.

How much electricity will customers need? How will demand change? Where are the best renewable resources? What transmission is required? What will it cost? What about reliability, storage, technical standards, climate, terrain, land access, regulation, customer behaviour and social licence? Scale that exercise across the National Electricity Market and the complexity becomes enormous.

AEMO's ISP process now incorporates around 67 different categories of inputs and assumptions, supported by extensive modelling, consultation and data.

It is a valuable example of systems thinking in practice.

Why does this matter for emerging leaders?

For professionals moving towards leadership, technical expertise remains essential, but increasingly it must be accompanied by an ability to understand the perspectives, constraints and priorities of others The development of Renewable Energy Zones provides a good example. Resource quality matters, but so do land availability, terrain, road access, existing infrastructure, environmental considerations, regional priorities and community acceptance. Developing the ISP therefore requires input well beyond engineers and system planners, bringing together governments, network businesses, developers, economists, consumer representatives, communities and other stakeholders.

For a future leader, the lesson is important: the technically optimal answer is not necessarily the whole answer. Major infrastructure decisions sit within a much broader environment of economics, policy, regulation, communities and competing priorities.

The discussion also showed that leaders must become comfortable making decisions under uncertainty. During the Q&A, participants challenged Eli on data centre growth, the role of distribution networks, policy settings, nuclear generation and what happens if the transition progresses more slowly than forecast. There was rarely a simple answer, because the future itself is not certain. Instead, planning requires scenarios, sensitivities, transparent assumptions and an understanding of how decisions perform under different futures.

Brisbane Summer school 2026

Building leaders who can see beyond their part of the sector

This is where Summer School offers something different from role-specific technical training.

Participants step outside their organisation and their immediate area of expertise to hear directly from people working across the power system. They can question experienced industry leaders, challenge assumptions and discuss the issues shaping Australia's energy future with peers from different organisations, disciplines and jurisdictions. Eli's ISP presentation is just one example of the conversations that take place.

For emerging professionals, it provides context for the work they do today and the decisions they may be responsible for tomorrow. For organisations investing in their future leaders, that broader perspective matters. Australia's energy transition will require people who not only understand their own part of the system, but can see how the pieces fit together and lead through the complexity that sits between them.

That is the bigger-picture thinking API Summer School is designed to develop.