Given our keen interest* in all forms of Demand Response operating within the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM), it was with interest that we noted this media release from AGL Energy a couple weeks ago about their trial of how emerging technologies, and the smart use of demand response, could help to manage peak demand in a residential network and ultimately reduce energy costs.
* Our keen interest is one of the reasons for beginning the creation of this specially-focused commentary site, as noted here
Our friend Sophie over at RenewEconomy provided these comments around the same time.
We’ve noted that the AGL trial ends today (Thursday 31st March 2016). We will be keenly awaiting whatever information AGL can publish, including on this focused Demand Response site, about its findings from the trial.
Naturally there will be elements of the learnings that they wish to keep confidential for commercial reasons (a common and natural motivation for organisations operating in the demand response space), but we hope that there are pieces of information that they can share to help the continuing development of demand response in this rapidly evolving energy sector.
In particular, we would like to understand more about how this trial builds on the learnings gained through the Smart Grid, Smart City trial (which David Dawson, one of the team members, wrote about here).