Australia's grid hit 80.5% renewables while curtailing 8.4GW
Victoria Shinder2 min readAt 12:30pm on Saturday, renewables supplied 80.5% of everything consumed on Australia's National Electricity Market — the first time the main grid has passed 80, and a record that had stood for exactly one day, the previous mark of 79.84% having been set the Friday before. Rooftop solar supplied more than half of that clean output. The analysis comes from Geoff Eldridge of Global Power Energy (GPE NEMLog), reported at https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/21/renewables-share-hits-record-high-in-nem-2/.
The number underneath it is the more interesting one. At the moment of the record, roughly 8.42 GW of available renewable output was being curtailed — 4.23 GW of solar and 4.19 GW of wind — while flexible load absorbed about 5.33 GW, of which 4.46 GW went into batteries and 880 MW into pumped hydro.
Sunday broke two more records in opposite directions. Operational demand fell to 9,422 MW, 244 MW below the previous low set on 4 October 2025 — and Eldridge was explicit that this was not a quiet day: a large share of consumption was simply being met behind the meter. Rooftop PV peaked at 16,993 MW at noon, 156 MW above Saturday and 13.4% above the 14,980 MW of a year earlier. And curtailment set its own record: 11,109 MW spilled at 11:55am, 256 MW more than the previous high of 10,854 MW from 5 October 2025.
What it means
A share record and a curtailment record on the same weekend are one fact, not two. Eighty percent was reached while the system was throwing away eight gigawatts it could have used. The binding constraint was not generation and not demand; it was what the network and the market could physically accept at midday.
Operational demand is becoming a worse description of the country's electricity. A record low of 9,422 MW while rooftop PV runs at nearly 17 GW means the grid operator's headline number is measuring the residual — what is left after households have served themselves. Planning, forecasting and revenue all still key on that residual, and it is shrinking faster than consumption is.
And 4.46 GW into batteries at the moment of the record is the part that will keep growing. That is storage doing exactly what it was built for, and it was still not enough to absorb the surplus. The gap between 8.4 GW curtailed and 4.5 GW charged is the size of the next build-out, stated in the only units that matter: what the system could not take.