By Geoff Eldridge, National Electricity Market (NEM) and Energy Transition Observer at Global Power Energy
What recent commentary reveals about fairness, trust, and coordination.
We do not notice the rules of a system until the rules begin to change. Over recent days there has been a noticeable concentration of posts across a wide spectrum of grid stakeholders—journalists, market commentators, analysts, researchers, consultants, and hands-on practitioners—all circling the same underlying question: what happens when the grid becomes genuinely two-way?
The topics look different on the surface—network access, flexible exports, fixed charges, batteries, forecasting, even “defection”—but they are describing the same transition phase. The system is moving from a one-way supply model to a participatory platform where household and device behaviour can shift outcomes at scale.
This post tries to stitch those perspectives into one coherent story. It is not an attempt to settle the debate. It is an attempt to make the moving parts easier to explain: what is changing, why it feels contested, and what we might notice if we want to proceed with lower friction and higher legitimacy.
Two questions sit underneath everything that follows. What are we now promising each other as a shared system? And how do we keep that promise believable as technology and behaviour move faster than institutions?
The new social contract
A shared system works when its rules can be explained in plain language.
For decades, electricity felt like a background service. It arrived when needed. Few people thought about local voltage, export limits, or whether the grid was one-way by design. The “agreement” was mostly implicit, because it rarely needed to be spoken.
That has changed. Rooftop PV and batteries turn households into participants, and participation forces rules into the open.
The shift can be described simply:
- The old agreement was quiet: Most customers were not expected to manage the system; they were expected to pay a bill and trust reliability.
- Two-way capability makes the grid feel personal: When households generate and store energy, the system feels like something you actively use, not just something you receive.
- Export becomes a managed service: At scale, unlimited export at all times is hard to reconcile with local and system constraints.
- Legitimacy becomes operational: As conditional access becomes normal, trust and transparency stop being “nice to have” and start being enabling infrastructure.
This reframing matters because many disputes are not really about a technical detail. They are about whether people feel the bargain is being rewritten without their consent.
Once the social contract is visible, the next issue becomes the daily shape of the system that participation creates.
Related article: What if—then what?
Rooftop PV made the duck curve
Patterns do not need permission to form. They only need enough repetition.
The duck curve is best seen as a behavioural shape. Rooftop PV dominates the system narrative because it is highly synchronised. It rises for everyone in a similar window, deepens mid-day net demand reductions, and then disappears quickly as the day ends.
That creates a set of system conditions that are now familiar:
- PV reduces operational demand mid-day: The grid supplies less during solar hours, and prices can fall sharply.
- Exports shift pressure to local networks: Where PV exceeds local load, voltage and hosting capacity become the active constraint.
- The evening ramp becomes more pronounced: Demand rises just as solar falls, concentrating system stress into fewer hours.
- Curtailment becomes part of the toolkit: In constrained periods, curtailment appears as a practical response to real limits.
This is why PV dominates the commentary. It shapes the daily profile by default.
The natural follow-on is batteries, because batteries introduce choice in timing. PV creates the shape; batteries influence what the shape becomes.
Batteries decide what it becomes
Flexibility is valuable when it is used at the right moment.
Batteries can fill the belly of the duck curve by charging when PV is abundant and can shave the evening peak by discharging when solar is absent. In principle, this is the right timescale for smoothing the daily profile.
The contribution is real, but it is not automatic. It depends on incentives, penetration, and coordination.
A balanced way to describe the role of batteries is:
- They can absorb surplus energy: Charging mid-day can reduce curtailment and ease export pressure in some locations.
- They can soften ramps and peaks: Evening discharge can reduce peak demand and the steepness of transitions.
- They can also create new edges: If many devices respond to the same signals, new ramps can appear at the start or end of charging windows.
- Their value is increasingly behavioural: The system outcome depends on settings, defaults, and automation, not only on capacity.
This leads to one of the most important meta-points in the current phase of the transition. The risks are no longer only about “enough plant”. They are about synchronisation.
If many devices do the same thing at once, the system feels it. That is where forecasting starts to change in nature.
Paying for the grid without losing the signal
A bill is a design choice about behaviour.
At the same time as the daily shape is changing, cost recovery is being renegotiated. Network costs are largely fixed in the short and medium term. Poles and wires do not become cheaper because a suburb buys more rooftop PV.
This is why fixed charges are being proposed more prominently. Yet the policy question is not only “how to recover costs”. It is how to recover costs without removing the signals that coordinate behaviour in a two-way system.
The tension can be described cleanly:
- Fixed charges stabilise revenue: They reduce reliance on volumetric consumption to fund long-lived assets and obligations.
- Price signals shape timing and flexibility: Variable charges reward load shifting, demand response, and battery operation in ways that can reduce future system costs.
- Equity becomes more visible: High fixed charges can reduce bill agency for low-use households and those without access to DER.
- Weakened signals increase reliance on control: If marginal signals fade, operational constraints and coordination mechanisms must do more work.
This is not an argument for one tariff model. It is a reminder that tariffs are both a funding mechanism and a behavioural mechanism. The grid needs both stable recovery and coordinated behaviour.
Once this is understood, it becomes clearer why a high-uptake jurisdiction is treated as a reference point. It shows what happens when the operational and behavioural realities are no longer theoretical.
South Australia as the dress rehearsal
Experience is what happens when the plan meets a real day.
South Australia is often discussed as if it holds the blueprint. A more accurate view is that it is an early mirror. High uptake means constraints, coordination tools, and customer-facing operational realities arrive sooner and more frequently.
What makes it valuable is not that it is perfect, but that it reveals what the script forgot to include.
The rehearsal lessons tend to be practical:
- Operational tools become everyday governance: Flexible exports, voltage management, and curtailment shift from exceptional events to routine practice.
- Export becomes a service level: Conditional access can enable more connections than static worst-case limits, but it requires clear explanations.
- Legitimacy becomes a system variable: The success of operational tools depends on whether customers experience them as intelligible and fair.
- Local realities dominate: A market-wide improvement can still leave a particular feeder constrained, so location and implementation matter.
This is where the debate becomes more grounded. The question is no longer “is this theoretically efficient?” It becomes “can people live with it repeatedly, and still feel the system is fair?”
That question leads naturally to forecasting, because the more participation and automation there is, the more the system becomes a behavioural environment rather than a purely physical one.
When forecasting becomes behavioural
When everyone follows the same signal, the signal becomes the event.
Forecasting used to be driven primarily by weather, routine demand patterns, and the availability of large generators. Those drivers still matter. What changes is that millions of small devices can now respond quickly to prices, rules, and defaults.
In a high-CER grid, the system is not only reacting to the weather. It is reacting to itself.
The behavioural turn shows up in several ways:
- Automation creates synchronisation risk: If many batteries or EV chargers respond to the same window, new ramps and peaks can appear.
- Feedback loops become faster: Behaviour responds to prices; prices respond to behaviour; constraints alter behaviour again.
- Diversity of response becomes valuable: A healthy system often needs staggered actions, not uniform actions.
- Visibility and data become essential: Forecasting improves when device behaviour and constraints are observable, not inferred.
This is why debates about retail plans, orchestration, and export rules are no longer side issues. They are now part of system predictability.
Once forecasting becomes behavioural, another challenge becomes unavoidable. The transition is not only building new things. It is also unbuilding old assumptions and incentives that no longer fit.
The exnovation problem
People accept change faster than they accept loss.
A large part of today’s tension comes from the work of exnovation: retiring or rewriting arrangements that worked well in a low-DER era but create distortions at scale.
Exnovation is difficult because it often feels like the removal of a promise, even when it is the correction of an assumption that was never designed for today’s penetration levels.
The contested retirements are familiar:
- Export expectations are being rewritten: What felt like an entitlement becomes a managed service level under constraint.
- Legacy incentives are being wound back: Support that was appropriate to start adoption can feel unfair once adoption becomes mainstream.
- Tariff logic is being updated: Cost recovery and behavioural signals must evolve as volumes and peaks change.
- Planning assumptions are being replaced: Passive demand is no longer a safe default assumption when automation can move load quickly.
Exnovation is where legitimacy is won or lost. If reforms land as punishment for early adoption, backlash is likely. If they land as system maturation with clear value exchange, they have a better chance of sticking.
This is also where the “two audiences” dynamic becomes central, because exnovation and complexity do not land evenly across households.
Two audiences, one grid
Not everyone wants to drive, but everyone wants to arrive.
One of the most practical meta-lessons from this set of debates is that the grid is serving two broad audiences at once.
Some households will engage deeply, optimise, and invest. Many will not. They may be renters, apartment dwellers, time-poor, or simply uninterested in turning energy into a project. They want abundant electricity with minimal friction.
Both perspectives are legitimate. The problem arises when reforms are designed as if only one audience exists.
A durable transition will need optional participation:
- Participants need pathways to create value: Clear signals, stable rules, and products that reward flexibility without excessive complexity.
- Passengers need a reliable default: Bills that remain intelligible, protections that are explicit, and reforms that do not punish low engagement.
- Fairness must include capability: If only some households can respond, policy must consider how costs and benefits are shared.
- Trust holds the system together: Without trust, both groups become less willing to cooperate, and more likely to retreat into narrow self-protection.
This is a useful place to land because it reframes the next phase as a design task. The system must learn how to support participation without requiring it.
Related article: Why the grid is Australia’s true energy challenge
Meta takeaways for proceeding well
Good design keeps more than one truth in view.
The most useful way to proceed is to treat this moment as a combined technical and social design problem. The following takeaways sit above the details and can guide better choices:
- Keep the trade-offs explicit and stable: People cope better when the reason for change is consistent, even if outcomes vary by day or location.
- Preserve meaningful marginal signals: Even if fixed charges increase, the system still needs incentives that reward helpful timing and flexibility.
- Define export as a service with clear service levels: Conditional access is more acceptable when rules, triggers, and review pathways are legible.
- Design for diversity of response: Avoid incentives that make everyone act at once; staggered behaviour is an asset.
- Treat trust as infrastructure: Transparency, dispute pathways, and predictable governance enable operational tools to work.
- Stage exnovation with transitional fairness: Retire old arrangements gradually, protect reasonable expectations where possible, and avoid a punishment narrative.
- Protect the low-friction default: The transition will be judged by people who do not want to become energy experts.
These are not slogans. They are practical design constraints for a participatory grid.
Conclusion
A system matures when its rules can change without losing its legitimacy.
The burst of debate in the past day is not noise. It is the sound of a system crossing a threshold. Once participation becomes mainstream, the grid stops being only an engineering artefact. It becomes a shared environment shaped by incentives, settings, rules, and trust.
A good path forward is not one that eliminates disagreement. It is one that makes the trade-offs intelligible, keeps participation optional, and helps people feel they are still part of a common system even as their capabilities diverge.
Article republished with permission. View the original article here.
