market reform








Making demand response work with negative prices

A recent development over in the WEM (paying energy users to consume, when there’s too much solar and wind) highlights the lack of foresight in the NEM … where we’ve implemented a significant reform (yet to start) that will do nothing to address negative prices.


Does the NEM need to be redesigned?

Guest author Stephen Wilson chaired an ‘ESIG Down Under’ conference webinar on ‘Designing the Energy Markets of the Future’. Whilst introducing the session, Stephen presented a diagram that helped to clarify the combination of different time horizons that need to be considered in holistically describing ‘the Market’. It will be of interest to WattClarity readers.




No Guarantee of Success

Our guest author, Allan O’Neil, poses a number of questions about the recently proposed “National Energy Guarantee” (NEG)



The war for dispatch: Who will control distributed energy?

In today’s energy sector, it is rare to get electricity networks, retailers, generators and system controllers in the same room at the same time. In a deconstructed market about to be transformed by distributed energy, how will decisions be made around how it is dispatched?





Puzzling through three rule change requests

Some ideas that I have been puzzling over – about the overlaps and contradictions between 3 rule changes under consideration at the AEMC currently
1) The Demand Response Mechanism (better known as the Negawatt buyback mechanism)
2) The Bidding in Good Faith deliberation
3) The Requirement for Price-Responsive (large) Demand to bid into central dispatch