The cheapest plan AEMO
has ever drawn.
The most expensive one
you'll ever pay for.

The headline that lies by falling.

AEMO cut the number by re-cutting the discount rate — not the concrete. In the same eighteen months a $5 billion interconnector was demoted from actionable to maybe, 45 GW of batteries quietly rewrote the transmission map, and household demand began a decline with no precedent in the NEM's history. The diff between the two plans is the most honest thing AEMO published.

So why does the press number still read like progress? We ran all nine material changes, the feedback loops they trigger, and who the new math quietly rewards.

The smallest slice — transmission — is the one you can't escape, and the one that overran.

Read the release. Then read the plan. Then read the silence.

"$6 billion of transmission saves you $30 billion" is true — inside the model. It never mentions the Regulated Asset Base, or the thirty-year recovery lag that decides your actual bill. One project, VNI West, now costs three to four times the viability limit AEMO set for it in 2020 — and the release left it out entirely.

The plan's own body is more honest than its announcement. The question is what got buried in the gap — and what neither document would say out loud.

The gap between the grey bar and the red bar is the spin.

One side owns the sunlight. The other owns the bill.

By 2035, for any household with a roof and a battery, walking away from the grid pays for itself in about two years. The 2.9 million who rent can't walk — and they inherit a transmission bill swollen by 90–500% overruns, recovered over thirty years across a shrinking base. The official story blames rooftop solar for the rising fixed charge. The arithmetic blames the wires.

So who pays to keep the lights on once everyone who could afford to leave already has?