This explainer outlines the technological and policy levers available to government and the energy sector to give people more choice over power use when it comes to energy demand and supply. It contends that better energy policy to relieve costs to customers is within reach.

This report from IEEFA highlights that consumers’ purchases of Distributed Energy Resources (DER), such as rooftop solar, battery storage and demand-responsive appliances, can unlock faster decarbonisation and lower energy bills if Australian energy ministers take supportive action.

Despite its high potential, the building's sector lags behind in reducing its energy demand. Tremendous savings can be achieved by deploying building management services during operation, however, the manual deployment of these services needs to be undertaken by experts and it is a tedious, time and cost consuming task.

This project involved the completion of building audits of three Council owned and managed buildings to review their performance, and energy use and to identify a range of actions that could be undertaken to reduce Council expenditure on energy (electricity and gas).

Building energy efficiency has been identified as a cost-effective opportunity to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and a variety of policies are being implemented to harvest this efficiency potential. However, there are growing concerns about a gap between predicted or expected energy consumption levels in buildings and the actual measured energy consumption in...