The Clean Energy Council’s Australian Clean Energy Summit (ACES) will be held over two days at Sydney’s International Convention Centre next week.

Over the past decade our team has regularly attended the conference (and occasionally presented). As you might expect, our interest is primarily in the operations of the electricity system. So, as a primer for that conference theme, here are four questions we’re pondering ahead of the summit.

How far will the clean energy compass swing?

The elephant in the room will be the recent or upcoming departures of several executives within the Clean Energy Council (CEC), including long-serving CEO Kane Thornton, COO Ashleigh Dalmau, GM’s Christiaan Zuur, Arron Wood, and Nick Aberle, along with a number of policy officers.

Ryan Cropp from the Australian Financial Review reported earlier this week that CEC members recently received a note from the organisation’s board outlining a new advocacy direction—including an explicit move to steer the organisation toward a position that is more supportive of gas. The note framed the shift as a matter of strategic credibility:

“We must therefore accelerate our efforts to promote the adoption of industry practices that are designed to maximise the benefits of the transition and minimise the adverse impacts.

This involves being pragmatic of the role in the short to mid-term of gas. Acknowledging this reality is critical to our credibility as an industry body.”

While the pragmatic shift has been foreshadowed, it marks a fundamental change in the CEC’s brand—one that, ideally, reflects a shared consensus among its members.

Three members of the CEC’s board—Ross Rolfe, Rob Wheals and Karen Gould—will appear on the ‘Developing the future generation portfolio’ panel beginning at 11:00am on Day 1, Tuesday 29th of July. That panel will also include Anthony Fowler and Sinead Taylor.

How are proposed solutions to the ‘tenor gap’ progressing?

The ongoing Nelson Review is now past its halfway point.

Back in May, the four-person panel embarked on a tour of the NEM to share their initial summary of submissions. The initial review identified ‘the tenor gap’ as one of the key problems: a decreasing appetite from buyers to contract, and growing uncertainty of financial returns for sellers.

In that tour, the panel outlined a proposed direction for reform, including:

• A new long-term investment mechanism that

  • Enables the entry of new services

  • Focuses on services, not technologies

  • Includes demand-side and small-scale resources

  • Facilitates the delivery of essential system services

• Options to keep medium-term derivatives markets liquid

• Avenues to encourage visibility of responsive resources (e.g. industrial loads, smaller batteries, smaller generators)

Final recommendations from the review are expected by the end of the year.

Tim Nelson will be delivering the keynote for the session ‘Future Energy Market Design’ starting at 4:40pm on Day 1, Tuesday 29th of July.

How much closer are we to a data centre wave hitting the NEM?

Earlier this week there was some interesting news from an electricity market aboard, when PJM’s 2026/27 capacity auctions cleared at a record‑high $329.17/MW‑day, hitting its market price cap in all zones, and landing approximately 22 % above last year’s results. The surge was fuelled by surging demand from data centres, which far outpaced modest supply additions (2,669 MW of new or upgraded capacity since the last auction) and highlighted persistent grid constraints. In total, the volume of supply procured was only 139 MW higher than the market’s projected reliability requirement, which may be a sign that hyperscalers may increasingly need to opt for a BYO energy approach.

For a number of years now, many—including ourselves—have anticipated an inevitable increase in electricity demand in the NEM from data centres, albeit with significant uncertainty around the scale and timing. So far, there have been few obvious signs of material impact, but interest is clearly growing. Earlier this week, ABC reporter Daniel Mercer published a piece in which he interviewed several market stakeholders to gather viewx on how AI-era demand with impact the grid. This followed an article by the ABC’s Samuel Yang twelve months earlier, which speculated on the emerging energy needs of data centres.

A session titled ‘Powering big data’ will be held at 3:30pm on Day 1, Tuesday 29th of July, featuring panellists David Scaysbrook, Rob Koh, Shayne Kumar, Hannah Heath and Andrew Walton.

Which market risks and uncertainties will be the focus of this years discussion?

There’s always a long list of open questions in the NEM—from who will invest in gas infrastructure (and when), to how the growing BESS fleet will shape market outcomes, to how well forecasting is keeping up with the system’s transformation.

While some of the key themes from last year—like the introduction of the Capacity Investment Scheme, the wind-down of the RET, delays to grid connection, and the implementation of system protection schemes—remain in focus, the conversation is gradually evolving as the market shifts and new risks emerge.

As such, I’m particularly looking forward to the session ‘Forecasting key trends in the Australian energy market and system’ to be held at 2:00pm on Day 2, Wednesday 30th of July.

That panel will feature WattClarity contributors Jonathan Dyson and David Leitch, alongside Joel Gilmore, Steven Oswald, Peter Sherry and Sabine Schleicher.

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A number of our team members, including myself, will be heading down to Sydney next week to attend the conference. Drop us a line if you’d like to catch up.