Customer and stakeholder voice - Phase 3

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).

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.

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.


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.