Events, conferences, webinars and podcasts

I'm thrilled to have been invited to speak at CEDA - Committee for Economic Development of Australia’s Climate & Energy Summit 🌏⚡​ in Melbourne on 30 April.

Quarterly industry networking breakfast, 18 November, 2025

Event details

I talked about: V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid), including for 2-wheelers.

All Energy, 29 October 2025

Event details, Slides

I highlighted the need for default flexibility in new household and business appliances to support efficient, grid-responsive electrification, as advocated in the recent Energy Efficiency Council report co-authored with Dr Dylan McConnell. Reform proposals include shifting from outdated state white certificate programs toward a national subsidy scheme for flexible devices, equity-focused consumer incentives, national DER technical regulation, and interoperable standards to ensure all appliances and DER can participate in energy markets and deliver system flexibility.

CSIRO/Energy Queensland/Vietnam Electricity (EVN), 14 October 2025

News article

This was a workshop on planning, contracting, implementing and operating Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) in the distribution system for Vietnamese Power Corporations, the National Market System Operator (NSMS), EVN and others.

Engineers Australia’s Climate Smart Engineering Conference, 28 August 2025

Conference summary video, Conference website

What the panel talked about: The CSE Conference is Engineers Australia’s flagship annual event gathering engineers, policymakers, and industry leaders to strategise the role of engineering in climate mitigation, resilience, and the transition to net-zero. Heidi Lee (Moderator, CEO of Beyond Zero Emissions), Rainer Korte (Commissioner, Australian Energy Market Commission), me, Dr Ian Oppermann (AI and digital economy expert) and Satya Tanner (CEO, LAUTEC Australia) emphasised systems thinking, adaptive engineering and broad collaboration to ensure climate security while maintaining reliable future energy infrastructure.

Partnerships for Infrastructure/CSIRO, 26 August 2025

Event summary

This workshop on System Planning for the Energy Transition with energy experts from across Southeast Asia. I gave a general overview of DER integration.

Australian National University, 21 February 2025

The Neighbourhood Battery Conference at ANU is a major national event that gathers energy experts, policymakers, industry leaders, and academics to discuss the latest research, policy, and implementation of neighbourhood-scale battery storage across Australia.

Keynote speech, 2024 Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference (APSRC), November 2024)

Watch speech

What I talked about: How DER can deliver significant economic and resilience benefits by leveraging existing assets, reducing the need for new infrastructure, and enhancing equity—provided technical standards, regulation and visibility are systematically addressed. The talk emphasises integrating flexible hot water, dynamic export limits, and real-time network support services, and asserts that prioritising DER at least equally alongside large-scale renewables is vital to achieving grid reliability, carbon targets, and the consumer-led transition

Australian Institute of Energy (AIE) - Sydney Branch AGM, November 2024

With Oliver Nunn (Managing Director, Endgame Economics) and Bill Nixey (Manager Network Pricing, Ausgrid)

I spoke about this proposition:

1. Tariffs are a price signal

2. Roughly half the tariff is determined by the economic regulation of networks

3. We need the size of the pie – the determination of network revenue to be economically efficient and appropriate for the energy transition (affordability)

4. We need the allocation for payment of slices of the pie to be fair (maybe proportional to the use of the network? But what about location?)

5. We need appropriate regulations and smart infrastructure/appliances for people to be able to respond to tariffs

Keynote, 2024 IEEE PES Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, 20 November 2024

I talked about: As we saw in South Australia in 2019, in the Black Summer bushfires, in Broken Hill last month, the electricity system in Australia is both a large source of carbon emissions and highly vulnerable to extreme weather events which are becoming more and more frequent. Both challenges can be partially mitigated by speeding up our adoption of and integration of Distributed Energy Resources into the electricity system. I spoke about the benefits of DER, the basic changes that are needed to the engineering and regulation of the system to support DER integration, one advance change where DER can lower the costs of the power system and the role of DER in resilience.

31 October 2024, Canberra

Hansard PDF, YouTube

I testified that current planning and regulatory frameworks in Australia systematically undervalue the role of DER and called instead for these to be explicitly integrated into system planning and reliability forecasts. I specifically criticised the bias towards expensive, inter-state transmission projects in the Integrated System Plan, recommending that regulatory and investment tests properly model demand-side resources, and that market reforms enable all consumers—including vulnerable and low-income households—to participate in and benefit from DER and flexible demand solutions.

Keynote at the REROC Conference, 28 August 2024

Overview, Slides

Keynote at Energy Week WA, 15 August 2024

About the event

I discussed the topic of optimising DER for the transition, the economic benefits of DER integration, and the meta-analysis completed for IEEFA, suggesting a $19bn benefit by 2030 for the NEM. Additionally she will talk to how Integrate to Zero is developing a universal method of calculating these benefits and the work Arup is doing to develop a global benefits number. In relation to driving network services benefits Gabrielle will talk to her work on the IEEFA report on reforming the economic regulation of Australian electricity distribution networks, and will discuss the European and US experiences with DER for network services as a result of this research.