The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2025 (WEO-25) frames an “Age of Electricity” where power systems become the central determinant of affordability, reliability and emissions outcomes. Across its scenarios, electricity demand grows much faster than total energy use, and the IEA is explicit that the limiting factor is no longer generation alone, it’s grids and flexibility. The world is building renewables quickly, but network capacity, connection timelines and operational flexibility are struggling to keep pace.

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Australia is already living the “grid + flexibility” bottleneck

Australia’s National Electricity Market is effectively an early case study of the IEA’s thesis. Higher penetrations of variable renewables are translating into more frequent periods where renewables set prices, including extended low and negative price intervals in solar-heavy regions, alongside sharper volatility as supply becomes more weather-driven. In this environment, the gap between an asset that looks attractive in modelling and one that performs in real operations often comes down to execution and dispatch quality, constraint awareness, and the ability to adapt quickly as conditions change.

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Why value is shifting from “owning assets” to “operating assets well”

That’s the key parallel between WEO-2025 and the Australian market reality: value is shifting from “owning the asset” to “operating the asset well.” When the grid is constrained and prices swing rapidly, the market rewards portfolios that can respond reliably: charging when prices collapse, discharging into scarcity, and avoiding intervals where network conditions or local constraints would otherwise convert theoretical revenue into missed opportunity.

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Where PowerSync creates advantage in the NEM

This is where PowerSync’s advantage becomes tangible. As grids become the bottleneck, orchestration platforms that combine forecasting, optimisation, and low-latency control unlock more usable value from the same hardware. Rather than treating each site as a standalone unit, PowerSync coordinates batteries, solar and flexible loads as a portfolio - so dispatch decisions reflect real constraints(state of charge, ramp limits, operating envelopes, site constraints and compliance requirements) instead of idealised assumptions.

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Flexibility scales, but precision wins

WEO-2025 highlights that flexibility is not a single-technology story: batteries are scaling quickly, but they don’t remove the need for smarter operation and better coordination—especially while networks remain the critical constraint. In Australia, that translates into a market where more batteries mean more competition, and outperformance becomes less about capacity and more about precision, meaning, how much of the available value is actually captured. Software-led orchestration is what separates “installed MW” from “earning MW.”

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Hardware uncertainty increases the value of better utilisation

The IEA also flags supply chain and security risks, particularly the concentration of critical minerals refining and the rise of export controls. For Australia, the commercial implication is practical: when hardware is slower to procure, more expensive, or harder to deploy, the premium rises on extracting better performance from what already exists. Orchestration becomes an efficiency lever to improve utilisation, reduce lost intervals, and enabling safe value stacking across multiple revenue streams.

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The takeaway

WEO-2025 is a global story about electrification accelerating while grids lag. Australia is a front-row seat to that dynamic, where volatility and constraints are already shaping returns. PowerSync is built for this phase of the transition: turning complex, constrained market conditions into a controllable operating environment so asset owners can consistently capture more value, with compliance and reliability engineered in.

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Contact PowerSync Technologies today to discuss how orchestratedoperation across batteries, solar and flexible loads can improve real-worldvalue capture in the NEM, especially as network constraints and volatility become defining features of the decade ahead.