The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) recently released its annual assessment of electricity security for the coming 10 years (see Australian Energy Market Operator, 2018). The 2018 report showed that not only were AEMO increasingly concerned about climate change, but that current projections of extreme heat had caused them to increase their anticipated maximum energy demand over the 10-year outlook. This is the first time AEMO have done so. Motivated by this concern, this research addresses the question: do current projections of Australia’s climate future provide the required information for AEMO to adequately plan for extreme heat?

To address this question, we use downscaled projections that have already been produced for Australia (NARCliM (Evans et al., 2014) and Climate Change in Australia (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, 2015)) to examine regional climate change impacts. As these projections are compositionally different, we first assess their suitability to inform projections of maximum energy demand. We next identify the optimal downscaling characteristics (i.e. downscaling method, most suitable global/regional climate models, temporal/spatial resolution) for informing projections of maximum energy demand, helping to clarify whether dedicated climate projections need to be produced for this purpose.