Good morning, everyone. Wow, what an act to follow. 

I’d like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today – the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people – and pay my respects to elders past and present.

I’m very pleased to speak to you today about the important work we’re doing at the AEMC and how it will help consumers, large and small, meet the challenges and capture the opportunities of the energy transition. 

I’ll start by talking about our role and the important change in the national energy objectives that requires us to take emissions into account in our decision making. 

I’ll update you on progress on the reforms our Chair outlined to you last year. 

And finally, I’ll give an overview of developments, challenges and opportunities that we are currently, or will be working on. 

Firstly, our role at the AEMC. 

We’re an independent statutory body responsible for making and reviewing the national energy rules and advising Ministers. 

It’s our job to make sure all the bits and pieces come together and keep working effectively. We also ensure changes are subject to appropriate governance, including consultation. 

I think of the AEMC as the steward of our market system. 

Dictionary.com defines stewardship as the responsible oversight and protection of something considered worth caring for and preserving. 

Protection doesn’t mean avoiding change. Quite the opposite. Protecting something you care about involves keeping it safe from harm, while building resilience so it can adapt to change.

The national energy frameworks must adapt to:

• manage the unprecedented uncertainty and complexity of change occurring in the sector, and
• harness the potential opportunities for consumers. 

The technical and economic characteristics of our energy system are changing as we strive to achieve our emissions targets. And the pace of change needed is much greater than we have experienced to date. 

As an industry, we must act quickly to deliver the change needed. 

As the rule maker, we must do things differently to achieve the pace required, while remaining a responsible steward. 

At the AEMC, we’re looking at ways we can move more quickly and be more effective. 

We’re consulting, collaborating and communicating more to encourage change from industry, consumers and government partners. 

We’re in a unique position. We see how all the pieces fit together and we want to take advantage of this to increase the pace and impact of what we can do. 

This will mean being more vocal and proactive about issues as they arise and partnering to deliver reforms that unlock value for consumers. 

The lines between participants in the industry are blurring. Changing economics and technology are eroding the once highly protected segregation of roles and responsibilities between generators, networks, and retailers. We need to ensure our processes don’t unnecessarily reinforce barriers that are no longer helpful. 

Welcoming new players that can innovate new products and services for customers leads us to consider the protections and opportunities for customers and their role in the market. 

We want consumers to take advantage of these opportunities – but we don’t want important protections to become less effective as those products and services change. This may mean rethinking the scope and model for how consumer protections are provided. 

Energy consumers are our most valuable asset. As our Chair puts it, consumers are the hero on the road to net zero. They will play a critical role in delivering a low-emission, low-cost, secure, reliable and safe energy system. We want to hear from you on what needs to be done and how we can do it better and faster. 

As service providers delivering energy, and market bodies responsible for making the market work, we must work together to achieve the low-cost system consumers deserve.

We all care about reducing emissions. The challenge is how we get there as quickly as we need to while maintaining reliability and minimising consumer costs. 

We need more investment. New generation must be available before coal exits to maintain a secure and reliable system. But there’s a gap in the economics and the timeframe is uncertain. 

Government support provided through avenues such as the capacity investment scheme and renewable energy zones will help bridge the gap. However, these schemes are not a substitute, nor should they displace or distort our future market system. 

One way to ensure our market system delivers the right outcomes to consumers is to embed the value of emissions reduction in our decisions. 

Last year, we were able to include this new tool in our toolkit, with the inclusion of emissions reduction in our energy objectives.

This gives us the ability to formally and explicitly consider emissions reduction in our work.

AEMO and the AER must also take this into account when developing the optimal development plan and assessing proposed network investments. 

This year, this tool becomes sharper. The Ministerial Council on Energy has released a statement outlining a methodology and interim values of emissions reduction. 

We have updated our guide on how we will apply these new tools in our rule-making process and when making recommendations in reviews. 

This includes how we take into account the value of emissions reductions in a quantitative cost benefit analysis. 

I’m now going to look at some of the work we’ve been doing and what it means for you.

I’ll start with the areas our Chair, Anna Collyer, talked about at last year’s conference, namely:

• Transmission Access Reform,
• Market price settings, and
• Consumer Energy Resources.

In terms of transmission access reform, we have just released a consultation paper outlining progress and next steps implementing priority access and a congestion relief market for the transmission system. 

Priority access will provide an additional risk mitigation tool to encourage efficient location decisions and avoid cannibalising the value of generators when subsequent generators connect. 

The congestion relief market will provide incentives for generators to bid more cost effectively and achieve more efficient dispatch. 

These reforms will encourage more renewable generation where it’s efficient, reducing the need for new transmission infrastructure and total costs to consumers. 

We’ll make final recommendations to Energy Ministers this year.

On market price settings, we made a final rule at the end of last year to amend these settings in the NEM from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2028.

The revised settings will:

• support investment in a mix of supply options, including storage, demand response, and gas generation, and
• help decarbonise the NEM and address reliability risks at the lowest possible cost to households and businesses. 

While the changes could result in relatively small short-term cost increases for consumers, they will deliver lower bill costs and higher reliability over the long term. Additional investment supported by the government’s expanded capacity investment scheme may also reduce the cost impact.

And on Consumer Energy Resources, we made a draft recommendation in February to better integrate flexible CER into the power system and unlock value for consumers.

Large customers will be able to choose multiple energy service providers for their premises. 

Flexible CER such as rooftop solar, batteries, and electric vehicles can be metered and managed separately from more passive loads, while in-built measurement capability in technology such as streetlights and EV chargers reduces the need for additional meters.

Consumers, particularly large consumers, will benefit from different products and services, reduced consumption charges and be rewarded for changes in behaviour and behind-the-meter assets.

Another couple of projects worth mentioning are the retailer reliability obligation and smart meters. 

We’ve made recommendations to improve the operation of the retailer reliability obligation, or RRO, aimed at reducing retailer – and consumer – costs while maintaining reliability. 

And we made a draft rule to accelerate the deployment of smart meters to all energy consumers by 2030.

Smart meters enable consumers to take charge of their power generation, usage and storage. They also encourage retailers and other intermediaries to provide innovative products, services and pricing arrangements. 

The roll-out of smart meters will facilitate lower network, metering and generation costs to benefit all consumers.

These recommendations include important safeguards to protect consumers from changes in charges and upfront fees.

We expect to release our final rule in the second half of this year.

While much has been achieved, there is still much to do.

We must consider all opportunities to increase low-emission capacity in the system while maintaining security and reliability. 

Government programs such as the capacity investment scheme and renewable energy zones are designed to encourage more grid-scale generation. They aim to improve revenue certainty for investors and better coordinate planning and connection processes. 

We’re keeping an eye on these schemes to understand their impact on the market and advise on their design, so they work to address the gaps. Experience with these schemes can also teach us a lot about refinements to the rules to better support our energy future. 

We’re progressing rules associated with our transmission planning and investment review, transmission access reform and providing clarity and certainty in regulatory and connection processes. 

Our recent financeability and concessional finance rule changes will facilitate quicker investment decisions and ensure the benefits of concessional finance flow to customers. 

However, a significant source of low-cost low-emission generation capacity sits with consumers and is yet to be fully utilised.

I spoke earlier about our rule changes which aim to enable consumers to benefit from flexible CER. But an even greater opportunity exists by making these resources visible and dispatchable. 

This will enable AEMO to take these resources into account more reliably when forecasting capacity needs – and offer this capacity into the market. 

Leveraging this load reduces the need for additional investment in grid-scale generation and networks, reducing the costs to all consumers. It also enables consumers to earn revenue in the market, should they choose to participate. 

The more consumers that participate, the more likely costs of additional infrastructure can be avoided. 

We expect to make a final rule on this in July.

While we continue to look to the horizon to stay ahead of the game, there are some challenges currently before us.

Significant issues are brewing in the gas sector. As we realise our ambition to reduce emissions, the future of natural gas becomes clearer. 

The fact is jurisdictions are making policy decisions that will reduce the use of natural gas for households, industry and electricity generation. 

But it remains uncertain how we’ll manage this transition. 

Coal exits highlight the continued need for gas-fired generation to maintain reliability and security of supply.

But fewer customers will pay more to maintain increasingly underutilised assets. 

This has implications for critical industries reliant on gas with no viable or commercial substitutes.

A lot of thought is going into this challenge. 

Working together with consumers, industry, government and market bodies may help us develop a sensible plan with appropriate support programs that minimise customer costs and impacts. 

An area we’re about to look at is the role and opportunities of network and retail pricing reform in the transition. Pricing is arguably one of our most underutilised tools and understandably so. 

It’s almost universally agreed that more effective use of pricing and incentives can improve the infrastructure, location and use decisions of energy delivery service providers and consumers. 

The theory suggests that utilised effectively, efficient pricing can reduce the overall costs to consumers. 

However, there are many barriers to introducing an improved pricing and incentive system. There will be winners and losers. But managing the consumer impact and ensuring appropriate targeted support can be less costly than ignoring this valuable tool.

There is much work to do to understand what pricing and incentives can do, how signals should be provided and what we mean by more efficient tariffs anyway. 

The interface between network and retail tariffs is important but do customers need more complexity?

This work can also help guide the integration of electric vehicles so that we start tackling this issue the way we want to finish, avoiding new problems for the future. 

We are developing terms of reference for this important piece of work and will need all stakeholders to work together to achieve change. 

A final challenge worth noting is how we make better use of data, which could unlock even more value from existing assets and improve planning for future needs. 

Improved access and use of data can support better decisions across the sector and by consumers. It can reduce system costs while identifying and unlocking value for individuals.

We have made recommendations on this in our smart meter review and look forward to receiving a rule change request on access to real-time data so customers can access the full suite of benefits that smart meters offer. 

These issues lend themselves to the collaborative process.

They present opportunities for participants like yourselves to do better from the new energy market and shape the transition.

We want to ensure consumers can maximise the benefits of engaging in the market – while also making the transition work for those consumers who do not.

So finally, to recap. 

We recognise the significant work that needs to be done, and at pace, to achieve net zero. 

We are continually testing whether we can increase the pace at which we work while ensuring a low-emission, safe, reliable and secure energy system is delivered at lowest cost. 

We also want to enable customers to engage directly with the energy system, without needing or expecting them to do so.

We want to do better, more and faster and look forward to your help to do this. 

Thank you.