This is the second and final report for the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living research project RP3038, Lower income barriers to low carbon living. The first report, Summary of focus group and survey findings, detailed the findings from our focus group discussions with lower income households across four Australian jurisdictions.

This discussion paper provides an overview of the challenges, opportunities and solutions to providing regional NSW with affordable, reliable and sustainable electricity.

This resource suggests that there are a wide range of financial and non-financial barriers limiting the ability of lower income households to address energy deprivation.

This discussion paper highlights the need for understanding the ultimate impact on electricity prices when making any changes to how transmission infrastructure is planned, built and operated. 

This paper looks at prices in the National Electricity Market before and after the closure of this Victorian power station in April 2017.

Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) are uniquely positioned—and publicly committed—to ending energy poverty. However, MDBs’ common approach to energy access often overlooks the particular ability that decentralized renewable energy (DR energy or DRE) enterprises have to radically alter the access timeline.

Historical approaches to energy and development are out of date and out of time. Achieving universal energy access by 2030, as envisioned in Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7), will require a thoroughly different approach that focuses on radically accelerating access to energy at the country level through decentralized renewable energy (DRE).

Solar-powered batteries are the key to a future without electricity grids for Polynesian countries in the Pacific.

Solar airconditioning is an emerging renewable energy technology that is technically proven and suitable for wide scale deployment. Unfortunately, solar airconditioning cannot compete on a level playing field with other renewable energy technologies because it is not eligible for government rebates such as those awarded to solar photovoltaic electricity or solar hot water systems.

This paper aims to revisit the way that distributed energy resources (DERs) interact with the present structures of the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM), and consider opportunities to improve the interface between centralized and distributed resource operation and investment.

Local electricity sharing schemes have the potential to play an increased role in the Australian National Electricity Market as the penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) continues to grow. These models allow participants to share energy between separately owned and operated DERs, however are largely untested.

In the future there will be an increased uptake of solar and battery systems in the residential sector, driven by falling battery costs and increasing electricity tariffs. The increased uptake means we need new methods to forecast electricity demand when considering these technologies.
This paper has achieved this goal using a two stage model.