The Australian energy grid has been in the news recently because of the intense heat waves and how the coal-dependent grid has been responding to both the heat itself and to the increased demand that comes from people cranking up the AC.

While the article linked above discusses how the 'super efficient' coal plants were failing with greater frequency than the standard coal plants during the heat, a separte issue that's come from this issue is the ability of the Australian grid to respond to the situation through energy management: implementing dispatchable resources like solar, encouraging load shifting tactics, and more.

Specific strategies taking place have included mandatory customer cutting of power usage (twice in 24 hours) from the industrial sector, load shedding in 60,000 homes on a staggered basis, calling on other power retailers/distributers to send surplus power that's stored in batteries or other grid resources, and even tapping the state's fleet of diesel generators.

Also noteworthy was that South Australia renewable energy has been contributing heavily during these days:

Obviously the most important thing in the short term is that solutions are found to keep the lights on and AC running for critical areas (hospitals, homes with vulnerable occupants like the elderly, sick, or children, etc.), but what should be the long term takeaway from this? It seems that the build out of more coal or gas baseload generation could be one proposed solution, but part of the issue is how many of the existing fossil fuel generators are specifically down for repairs to have caused this situation in the first place. So are there more energy-management-specific solutions that should be implemented for these situations in the future-- both in Australia and elsewhere?