This is a very belated and back-dated article (i.e. almost exactly 9 years after ACES 2017, as we lead into ACES 2026) 

I can still remember the audience response (some blank look, some gasps) following my answer to a Question from the Audience following my delivery of this ‘Forecast of Sorts’ (controversial in its own right) during ACES 2017.

1)  An audience member asked me what I saw as the number 1 thing that could be put in place to support the successful delivery of the energy transition

2)  Back at the time:

(a)  There was much discussion about the RET (and the Warburton Review, which had finalised in August 2014, was a recent memory)

(b)  so to most of the audience it was out-of-left field when I noted:

i.  don’t focus on more pump-priming the market to build in more (random) projects … such as via the RET;

ii.  but rather be directly focused on what was required to close coal.

>  A schedule for closure of coal (which did not exist at the time) was a large part of this.

>  what was in my head at the time, though we were still ~ 2 years away from publishing the terms, was that this needed to take account of both ‘Anytime/Anywhere Energy’ and the ‘Keeping the Lights on Services’.

Two years later…

Note that it was ~ 2 years after the ACES 2017 conference when we* released the GRC2018 at the end of May 2019.

 * working in collaboration with Greenview Strategic Consulting 

That ~500-page document (analysis and statistical digest) was widely read across the industry, and generally well received.  There were some controversial aspects, however, such as in Theme 5 in which we stated that ‘The NEM has developed a ‘them and us’ schism’, which was belatedly shared in full here:

~31 months later still …

It was a few years later still when we wrote ‘The schism seems permanent’ as Key Observation #2 within GenInsights21 when we released that at the end of 2021.