Essential Energy continued the development of the Revised Proposal through extensive engagement with customers, stakeholders, Australian Energy Regulator (AER), consumer advocates and industry organisations.
In October 2023, we re-tested customers' willingness to pay for the new types of investments targeting resilience and the network of the future, with 96% of surveyed customers supporting these investments despite facing increased costs of living.
Our Revised Proposal will enable us to provide the safe, reliable and affordable network that our customers expect. It will also support a network that is resilient and flexible enough to accommodate new and emerging technologies. This includes pricing structures that keep pace with the changing energy market – particularly the increasing volume of consumer energy resources (CER) connected to and exporting into the network.
2024-29 Revised Regulatory Proposal
2024-29 Revised Regulatory Proposal Overview
2024-29 Revised Tariff Structure Statement
2024-29 Revised Tariff Structure Explanatory Statement
What happens next?
You can make a submission to the AER by 19 January 2024.
The AER will deliver a final Determination by 30 April 2024, with changes to network charges taking effect from 1 July 2024.
For further information, or to make a submission about our 2024-29 Regulatory Proposal, please visit the Determination page on the AER website.
Essential Energy’s Regulatory Proposal for 2024-29 is almost finalised.
Our regulator, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), has provided its draft decision on the Regulatory Proposal that we submitted in January 2023, largely approving what we proposed.
This Proposal, which outlines our plans for the next five years, was built based on engagement with you, our customers, and stakeholders, during several forums from 2021 through to 2023.
Since January, we have also continued to refine a few elements of our Proposal, including through talking to customers who are part of our new Essential People’s Panel and a Customer Webinar held in October.
We are now considering all feedback to make any required changes to our Regulatory Proposal which we will re-submit by the end of November.
The AER will then review the updated Proposal, handing down its final decision in April next year and then it will come into effect on 1 July 2024.
With the release by the AER of its Draft Decision on Essential Energy's 2024-29 Regulatory Proposal we continue to engage with customers and customer advocates to prepare a Revised Proposal. This is due by 30 November 2023.
Engagement with customers and customer advocates ensures that our Revised Proposal is aligned with our customers’ priorities and their expectations of Essential Energy in relation to the services we provide today, and into the future, and meets customer investment preferences and priorities, in light of increased cost of living pressures.
Essential Energy submitted its 2024-29 Regulatory Proposal (Proposal) to the AER on 31 January 2023. As part of the regulation process the AER reviewed the Proposal and on 28 March 2023 the AER released an Issues Paper setting out its preliminary findings and aspects of the Proposal that require further consultation.
Essential Energy continues to engage with customers and customer advocates to work through the questions raised by the AER.
We have also established the Essential People’s Panel (EPP), to enable direct engagement with a representative group of Essential Energy customers. The purpose of the EPP is to provide a forum for Essential Energy to directly engage with customers on issues relevant to residential and small business customers such as pricing and affordability, reliability and resilience, customer service and communication.
The EPP comprises 21 connected residential and small business customers from across our network. The EPP are focusing on regulatory proposal issues this year however the group will continue after the Regulatory Proposal 2024-29 has been determined.
Essential Energy's Regulatory Proposal has now been lodged with the Australian Energy Regulator (AER).
We thank everyone who has provided their time, feedback and ideas to shape the Proposal.
In late 2023 we will hear from the AER and they will issue their Draft Determination. Essential Energy will have 45 days to respond, if any questions are raised.
The AER Final Determination will be issued in April 2024.
Customer and Stakeholder Engagement for the 24-29 Regulatory Proposal
Phase 4
October 2022
The engagement program as a whole consisted of four phases with a range of connected customers, business partners and stakeholders and utilised a variety of methods and levels of influence across the IAP2 engagement spectrum.
The focus of the Phase 4 engagement was to test the proposed content of the Regulatory Proposal with customers and stakeholders before its finalisation and submission in January 2023.
You can find the Engagement findings here.
The objective of the engagement program is to ensure the views and expectations of Essential Energy’s diverse customer base are accurately and meaningfully reflected in the business’s 2024-29 Regulatory Proposal, such that it is capable of acceptance and approval by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER).
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The goals of the engagement program:
- To identify and understand all issues that are important to customers.
- To involve customers in decisions that affect them.
- To understand their individual perspectives on matters relating to Essential Energy’s business.
- To distil technical concepts from the electricity industry in a way that can be more easily understood by the general public.
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During Phase 3 engagement we sought to understand which investments are the most important to customers and the trade-offs customers are willing to make, and to understand what customers are willing to pay for the different investments
We learned that customers and stakeholders would like us to increase our investment to:
- improve network and community resilience against a backdrop of increasing intensity of hazards, such as floods, storms and bushfires
- enable the network of the future by implementing real time network monitoring and dynamic assets to facilitate increasing levels of renewables generation connecting to the network
- increase sustainability of Essential Energy’s operations and reduce carbon emissions
- improve customer service by investing in a better system with a basic customer portal
You can read the engagement report here.
Nineteen customers from across our service area came together to delve more deeply into two-way prices (prices that charge for both consumption and exports). Two-way prices will help improve fairness in the prices that different customers pay and help reduce network costs by encouraging better utilisation of existing network assets. In the Phase 2 forum this issue generated a lot of debate, but through further engagement and education, customers supported the introduction of two-way prices. You can read more details about the day in the engagement report here.
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Next Steps
We now want to know what customers and stakeholders think of our Draft Proposal, so we will undertake a final phase of engagement before we submit our 2024-29 Regulatory Proposal to the Australian Energy Regulator in January next year.
Have you checked out our Virtual Room? The site provides information on the topics we are discussing at each phase of engagement, including videos that help to explain complex topics.
Phase 3 of the engagement program will involve more detailed trade-off and willingness to pay discussions across all the major topics/ categories and explanation of expected costs. The importance of each investment in the context of increasing electricity prices and cost of living pressures will also be explored.
A smaller group of customers will be engaged specifically in relation to pricing matters to ensure we engage at the depth required for this very complex topic.
Since November last year, people from across Essential Energy including executive, senior leaders, customer teams, asset management and operational team members, met with nearly 500 customers, small and medium businesses; Councils; young people, and CALD and indigenous groups.
Having genuine, meaningful and most importantly, collaborative discussions with so many people in the height of the Delta COVID pandemic required a deep commitment from all groups to contribute in the forums to develop our 2024-29 Regulatory Proposal, and we thank everyone who has been involved in the online sessions.
Now that we are moving into Phase Three we are looking forward to meeting in person, and will continue talking to customers in Taree, Ballina, Inverell, Dubbo, Broken Hill, Wagga Wagga and Bega.
At each phase of the engagement program we are testing ‘what we heard’ and building on knowledge from the previous round. The outcome from phase 2 is customers were able to give us a clear understanding of their priorities as well as their views and expectations in relation to key service outcomes around reliability, resilience and the future network.
You can read the engagement report here.
Essential Energy - 2024-29 Revised Regulatory Proposal - Nov23 (12 MB) (pdf)
