In your role at Ernst & Young Australia, what are the big questions that keep you up at night right now?

Thankfully, I tend to sleep well 😊 but some big questions that I think about include:

• Inflating prices for grid electricity: Will retail electricity prices remain affordable for consumers as investment scales up across the sector?
• Deflating prices for Behind the Meter electricity: As the cost of Distributed Energy Resources comes down (slower than hoped!), when will financed solar batteries hit the mass-market across residential and commercial and industrial sectors, and what is the simple customer offering that will achieve scale? Active assets, not active customers.
• Scaling consumer flexibility: How can we scale the use of consumer resources to provide flexible capacity in Virtual Power Plants? How can we simplify customer products that lead to active assets, not active customers (as simple, affordable set-and-forget products are most likely to achieve scale)?

What are the most exciting opportunities for the energy sector that could emerge before 2030?

Scaling transport electrification: This is the next frontier and the next major source of load growth (beyond data centres!). Scaling up charging infrastructure, and then scaling how we harness flexibility from electric vehicles (EVs) (e.g., vehicle-to-load and vehicle-to-grid), requires standardised approaches (e.g., permitting, connections, comms protocols, data exchange). Now is the time to nail down these frameworks before EVs hit the mass market.

With a NEM market review underway, what do you see as the most pressing areas to change?

I think the NEM market review is covering the right areas. I feel that after a turbulent few years the industry could benefit from stability and certainty to enable the rapid scale out of new resources, with continued government auctions for capacity investment and the new Improving Security Frameworks coming in for system security services. I would like to see more standardisation in the DER space (e.g. how new connections, dynamic connection agreements and emergency backstops are implemented across regions). I would also like to see the market review consider changes to network regulation – per below.

What innovations do you believe will have the most impact on the energy transition?

Continued battery storage and inverter/charger advances that:

• Increase energy density
• Reduce unit costs
• Enable V2X (initially vehicle-to-load and then to-grid)
• Bring second-life batteries from vehicles into lower-cost stationary storage application

These advances could have a profound impact on the volume and availability of storage over time.

What’s the one thing in the energy sector that no one is talking about, but should be?

Distribution network regulation, on two fronts:

1. How spending is incentivised – Can a totex model for network regulation lead to more efficient outcomes for customers if it encourages networks to focus more on using flexibility to manage constraints (rather than capex) and digitalisation (to support smart network operations)?
2. How costs are recovered – How should customers be charged for using the network as BTM generation and storage hits the mass market for homes and businesses, leading to broad differences in load profiles for those with/without DER?

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