Major global economies, including China, Germany, India, Japan and the United States, are making huge strides to improve their energy efficiency and adjust when they use energy – collectively called ‘energy management’. Global private and public investment in energy efficiency was AU$346 billion in 2018. These efforts are delivering huge dividends, with energy efficiency.

• Reducing energy bills
• Ensuring energy security
• Reducing emissions
• Creating economic growth and jobs

Global leaders in energy management share a key feature – they treat energy management as a core strategy for meeting the energy needs of homes and businesses. They recognise that energy management provides real capacity to energy markets, because every unit of energy that isn’t used is energy that doesn’t need to be generated.

This is not a marginal issue – energy efficiency improvements since 2000 reduced China’s annual energy demand in 2017 by near to 10 per cent. In other words, in 2017 China saved more than twice as much energy as Australia used that year.

Energy management is going to become more, not less, important as the proportion of generation coming from renewable energy rises. Reducing our demand for energy and better aligning when we generate and use energy will dramatically reduce the cost of generation, storage and network infrastructure.