Review of the System Restart Standard 2025 – Technical advice provided

On December 12, 2024 the AEMC commenced its review of the system restart standard (the Standard).

That’s probably old news to many readers but recently technical advice from AEMO was published in June 2025. It provides detail to inform the review.

Technical advice

The advice provides a sobering assessment of the interrelationships between supply restart capabilities, reliabilities of those resources, time, and load amidst consumer energy resources. All this (and more) lending higher levels of uncertainty to future system restart events.

The review

In the event of a major supply disruption, System Restart Ancillary Services (SRAS or restart services) are

“resources that are procured to restart the power system following a major disruption to supply”.

The Standard sets out several key parameters for system restoration, including the speed of restoration, how much supply is to be restored. It guides AEMO’s procurement of SRAS to fulfil those needs.

Recent events in Spain and Portugal remind us of the need for these services, in the rare event that they might be called upon.

Yet the energy transition is changing the power system and AEMC acknowledges AEMO has already identified several challenges for the provision of SRA, in 2024. In its advice AEMO remarks

“As the technologies underpinning the power system change, so too must the approach to supporting system restart.”

AEMC documents refer to the 2024 GPSRR (General Power System Risk Review) given the review started in 2024. Common themes continue to be present in the 2025 draft. The 2025 draft GPSRR points towards challenges:

• There is a limited pool of SRAS providers in some NEM regions, and some are potentially less capable of effectively commencing the process of restoring the power system.
• Lack of system strength during restart prevents most IBR from participating in the early stages of restoration.
• The risk of distributed PV impacts on system restart continue to grow,
• Public behaviour during restart may drive atypical load characteristics,
• The system restart path across NEM regions is moving with the changing generation mix.

The technical advice presents present-day and future restart scenarios that provide insight into how the challenges might manifest.

The advice makes recommendations to Standard aimed at supporting AEMO, and participants,  in ensuring the capability to rapidly recover and restart the power system is in place.

The AEMO technical advice to the AEMC’s review of the Standard was released in June 2025. It sits alongside submissions received earlier in the year from NSPs, the Clean Energy Council, Generators, an aluminium smelter (Tomago), the Energy Users Association of Australia and the Australian Aluminum Council.

The AEMC timing suggests the review will be complete by the end of 2025.