Australian governments are proposing to fund and build billions of dollars’ worth of new electricity generation capacity as the solution to our energy security crisis

Regardless of whether investments like Snowy 2.0 or ideas for ‘clean’ coal power stations go ahead, these supply-side solutions will require many years to build and will have no impact on security of supply next summer (2017-18).

Luckily, there are demand-side solutions that use energy more wisely, which could potentially secure hundreds of MW of supply headroom this year.

The National Energy Market’s rule making agency, the Australian Energy Market Commission has been considering rule changes to allow aggregated demand response to participate directly in the wholesale market, for some years.