2026-05-21
10 min read
Energy and Resources
Australia publishes roughly 100 public datasets that touch the energy market. Tomago, BlueScope and every council still cannot answer four basic questions from one screen. The bottleneck is not data — it is the front door. Companion to the Place-Data Australia report.
Pick any of the four questions that matter to anyone working on Australia's energy transition: Where is every operating generator? Which industrial sites draw more than 50 MW? What contracts has the Capacity Investment Scheme awarded and at what strike price? How many days of liquid-fuel cover does Australia hold, broken down by product? Each question has a public dataset, or a close cousin, somewhere on the federal–state web. None of them can be answered from one screen. The bottleneck is not data. It is the front door — the integration layer no agency is currently funded to own.
100+
energy datasets catalogued in YourGov's audit
YourGov's Place-Data Australia report catalogues 100+ public energy datasets across 14 thematic buckets — wholesale electricity, gas, generation by location, transmission, carbon, demand, tenements, biodiversity overlays. AEMO alone owns roughly 25 of them: 5-minute dispatch, MT and ST PASA, ISP workbooks, Gas Bulletin Board, FCAS dispatch. Most are CSV or JSON. Most are publicly licensed. The Clean Energy Regulator publishes NGER, Safeguard, ACCU and REC registers. Geoscience Australia ships Energy & Infrastructure shapefiles. OpenNEM reconciles half of it in near-real-time for free. The catalogue is unusually rich. The integration layer is unusually thin.
53%
of catalogued datasets are fully machine-readable
Bucket J — infrastructure consent registers — is the cleanest single illustration. NSW Planning Portal Major Projects: HTML only. Victorian Major Projects via engage.vic.gov.au: HTML only. EPBC Public Notices: HTML only. NOPTA petroleum titles: PDF + partial download. NOPSEMA environment plans: PDF. Zero out of seven datasets are fully machine-readable. Yet this is the layer that determines whether HumeLink, Sydney Ring, EnergyConnect Stage 2, the Hunter Power Station and 32 GW of CIS contracts actually get built. Every analyst, council and industrial buyer redoes the same scrape — because nobody owns the federation problem.
“AEMO's reliability-standard tightening is welcome but transmission build is too slow. Energy costs are the largest single risk to the Port Kembla blast-furnace re-line decision.”
— BlueScope Steel, FY24 results commentary
The Capacity Investment Scheme will award contracts-for-difference covering ~32 GW of renewables and storage by 2030 — the single largest capital-allocation programme any Australian government runs this decade. DCCEEW publishes aggregate volumes. Per-contract strike prices are redacted. The argument for redaction is commercial sensitivity. The same argument was made about the AEMO Reliability Reserve before transparency norms were tightened. If CIS strike prices stay private, every claim about whether the scheme is delivering value-for-money will rest on departmental modelling that cannot be independently verified. That is not consistent with the Data and Digital Government Strategy. It is the place to test whether the Strategy has teeth.
32 GW
of CIS contracts targeted by 2030
A federated-search layer over data.gov.au, the Digital Atlas of Australia, FED, the ABS DataLab and the eight state portals — typing 'bushfire risk Penrith' or 'utility solar pipeline NSW' should surface the right dataset, not seven. The Digital Atlas, launched October 2023 and led inside Geoscience Australia by Holly Badior, is the closest thing Australia has to that front door. It just doesn't pull in the dynamic feeds yet. Set a measurable target — 80% of the 14 catalogue buckets discoverable through the Atlas by December 2027 — and the goal becomes auditable. The DDMM is the political forum to commission it.
“Securing 24/7 firm renewable supply at competitive prices is the binding constraint. Wholesale price volatility threatens the smelter's viability beyond 2030.”
— Tomago Aluminium (Rio Tinto JV), Senate submission
YourGov is uniquely positioned to build the version of this that the public can use. The entity layer — every Commonwealth department and statutory body, every state agency, all 128 NSW councils — is already wired into the codebase. The strategy snapshots for ~927 entities are now published as JSON at /research/entity-snapshots/. The next move is the dataset layer on top: the 100+ energy datasets, then the broader place-data corpus, surfaced beside the entity that owns them. The companion report (Place-Data Australia) is the editorial spine. The next iteration is the live index.
Sources & Methodology
YourGov · Place-Data Australia report — /reports/place-data
YourGov · Research/energy-data corpus (13 working notes, May 2026)
AEMO · NEMWeb, ISP, Generation Information
Clean Energy Regulator · NGER, Safeguard, ACCU, REC registers
Department of Finance · Data and Digital Government Strategy 2025 Implementation Plan
Geoscience Australia · Digital Atlas of Australia
Read our full methodology →