The newly installed chief of the energy markets, New Yorker Audrey Zibelman???, made it clear her focus since she took on the job just over a week ago was to get through the summer ahead, in the light of the threats to the national energy supplies, which emerged last summer when there were successive warnings of low supplies in NSW and Victoria along with widespread blackouts in South Australia.

"We don't have a lot of time to act," she said Tuesday at a luncheon in Adelaide. "We need [market] rules based on experience, not economic theory."

She was speaking ahead of the closure at the end of the week of the Hazelwood power station in Victoria's La Trobe Valley, which has sent wholesale electricity prices sharply higher. Her comments also came in the wake of the release of the latest detailed report by the Australian Energy Markets Operator into the South Australian blackout, which occurred last September. Severe winds knocked out a number of wind farms in the state before collapsing transmission towers cut power supplies throughout the state, which took several weeks to rectify.

"Security on the [national electricity market] is now less certain than when it was designed," the chairman of the Australian Energy Market Operator, Anthony Marxsen???, told the luncheon. "The [ market] rules were written for a different age.

"We need to go back to the basics and establish an agenda which not only encourages competition but also efficient investment in the market."

The security of the nation's electricity supply has come under unprecedented threat over the past six months amid surging demand for energy, coupled with the increased reliance on renewable energy, such as wind and solar, which can be intermittent which has worked to exacerbate the supply problems. The supply disruptions have prompted the South Australian government to draw up its own response, which includes installing additional power generators in a bid to ensure further outages do not occur.

"Blackouts are symptoms of underlying complex problems," AEMO's Mr Marxsen said. "This summer has seen three instances of automatic load shedding and three instances of directed load shedding in four different NEM regions. We had a near miss of a second black system event in South Australia and multiple near misses of directed load shedding.

"Voluntary reduction of demand by customers over peak periods was an important factor in cutting blackout risk in two of these events."

Ms Zibelman stressed the need to focus more on energy demand than has been the case in the past.

"There is the opportunity to use distributed energy better," she said, referring to renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, "and use demand better, to balance the equation ... making demand [management] a much more active part of the grid."

Ms Zibelman ran New York's electricity system in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which caused widespread blackouts in the city in 2012. She was brought in to shake up the sector and to improve grid resilience.

Her comments on the need to avoid becoming bogged down in economic theory have added significance since the cumbersome approach to vetting new investment by electricity networks, for example, has been highlighted previously as a factor in the limited power supplies which flow into South Australia, leaving it exposed to blackouts. Earlier plans to link the NSW and South Australian grids were abandoned after prolonged delays, for example.

Mr Marxsen was speaking following the release of the fourth report by AEMO into the state-wide electricity blackout in South Australia last September after a mini-tornado brought parts of the transmission network down, which took several weeks to repair. The report reiterated the findings of earlier reports that the protective settings of some of the state's wind farms caused them to stop generating, which then caused a surge in imports from Victoria until it could no longer cope with demand, which was the trigger for blackouts.

Supplies were restored to 90 per cent of the the state's electricity users by around midnight following the outage, but it took some weeks before supplies were fully restored.

Some of the operations of the electricity market "require fundamental change to help us to better manage emergencies in which multiple factors are rapidly changing", Mr Marxsen said.

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