The Australian Energy Market Operator has warned that we're expecting a once-in-a-decade surge in electricity demand, putting Australia's energy system to the test.
But electricity expert Lasantha Meegahapola said we could avoid blackouts this summer.
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology electrical and biomedical engineering associate professor Lasantha Meegahapola said electricity demand could sometimes peak due to extreme weather conditions, such as scorching conditions driven by heatwaves.
"In theory, these extreme events occur once in a while, such as once in a decade," he said.
"However due to climate change consequences, the frequency of such events has increased in the past three decades.
"The electricity system should be ready to tackle demand driven by these extreme weather events.
"According to the Australian Energy Market Operator we are in a much better position than last year due to additional wind and solar capacity added to the system."
But he said the amount of energy produced by these renewable power sources was significantly lower compared to traditional generators, since they could only produce power when there's wind and sun.
"Relying too much on these generation sources is too risky without a large storage capacity built into the network," he said.
"Of course, having additional wind and solar power should reduce the risk of blackouts in the coming hot summer, but still, we cannot rule out any blackout risk.
"The operator needs careful planning to optimally utilise the additional wind and solar generators while coordinating with the energy storage systems.
"As we move towards a low-carbon power grid, the network requires more storage capacity to firm the output of the wind and solar energy generators."
He said community or neighbourhood batteries and microgrids were also part of the solution.
"These solutions would help us construct a more robust power grid that can cope with extreme weather conditions," he said.
"One solution should be that we get the energy storage systems, it could be a large scale energy system like a battery plant.
"Or it could be a community level and historic system like a neighborhood battery.
"But we don't have much time to implement such things."
Prof Meegahapola said the AEMO had already made an action plan to tackle the blackouts.
"But the question is, how good will their execution be when it comes to the plan," he said.
"What we have seen is, sometimes we make a lot of plans to avoid any risk, but the execution was is not so good.
"It's up to the operator to execute their plan so that they can reduce the risk of a blackout.
"But with the extreme weather events, sometimes it's unavoidable because we have seen such weather events in US and in Europe."
