Thank you for your welcome.

It is great to be here today in Naarm and I also acknowledge the Traditional Owners these lands, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. 

I pay my respects to their Elders past and present, and to the Elders of all First Nations communities on the lands we all rely on for generating and sharing energy today.

You may think of us at the AEMC as making the rules and running reviews for the NEM. And it’s true, that is certainly our day-to-day output.

But behind every rule change and review, the AEMC’s reason for existence by law is to promote efficient investment in, operation of, and use of electricity services, for the long-term interests of consumers. 

The impacts and benefits for consumers always play a leading role in our decisions. 

And as retailers you, of course, spend more time with the majority of consumers than any other participant in the energy sector. You’re a very important group of stakeholders for us and we welcome the chance to share updates today and to join the panel discussion shortly.

And given I will be on that panel soon, I thought this speech was a good opportunity to set the scene for our priorities for the year ahead and how they might affect you and your customers. 

Today I’ll share our four priority areas for 2025, the way we’re going to ensure we can tackle the workload so that you see timely results, and then finish up on what is probably top of mind for a lot of you, our Pricing Review. 

I believe there’s a chance to ask questions at the end of my talk, or we may roll straight into the panel discussion. Either way, I’m very keen to hear your thoughts and those of the other panellists.

The four priority areas

Like all of you and your organisations, I’m sure, we have an enormous range of potential work before us in the short and long-term, so we establish priorities that help us keep the most significant tasks at the forefront.

In 2025, our four priority areas are consumers, consumer energy resources, long-term market design, and transmission. 

I’ll quickly describe each area, because we frequently ask for your input on our projects and this gives you more context for your contributions.

Consumers

This first area – Consumers – captures work relating to urgent issues for consumers under the regulatory framework. It includes how we inform, empower and protect customers individually and as a collective.

Key projects here include:

1. The rule change for acceleration of smart meter deployment rule change
2. access to real time consumer data rule change
3. research that continues to improve our understanding of consumer behaviours and preferences
4. and our review on pricing for a consumer-driven future – I will spend more time on this later.

Consumer Energy Resources

The next priority area is consumer energy resources, or CER. While there is some crossover between these two priorities, the substantial scope of work for the technical aspects of CER does justify a priority in itself. 

That includes the efficient integration of new consumer-owned technologies into the market and system.

Some of the significant project work in this area includes:

1. our rule change for integrating price responsive resources into the NEM
2. the unlocking CER benefits rule change
3. we are also leading the distribution system operator workstream for the national CER Taskforce
4. and we are contributing to that Taskforce’s electric vehicle work.

Long-term market design

This priority is to progress work relating to longer-term market design to ensure our frameworks provide the appropriate reliability settings, efficient provision of system services and investment signals for the net-zero future.

This is obviously a very broad area, but some of the projects that most relate to retail include:

1. preparing for the future of gas, including the stage two gas reform rule changes that all energy ministers have asked us to consider
2. technical access standards rule changes
3. cyber security roles and responsibilities rule change
4.  our ongoing work on future wholesale market design, and our support for the Commonwealth’s endeavours in this field.

Transmission

And then, transmission continues to be a major priority for us to progress work relating to the cost-effective and efficient delivery of major transmission and network infrastructure.

Some of the important projects here include:

1. any outstanding rule changes from the Transmission planning and investment review (TPIR)
2. providing flexibility in the allocation of interconnector costs rule change
3. our market review of transmission access reform
4. inter-regional settlement residue arrangements for transmission loops
5. and rule changes relating to AEMO’s Integrated System Plan.

Special mention for emissions

Finally – just a reminder that we consider emissions reduction across our entire work program since its inclusion as a component of the national energy objectives from the end of 2023.

Earlier this year we released guidance for stakeholders on how the objectives shape our decision making, and this incorporates the advice we’ve received from energy ministers on the interim value of greenhouse gas emissions reductions. If you want to know more, that guidance is up on our website. 

25 in 25

So, that’s a very quick swoop through some of our 2025 priorities, and thanks for sticking with me through those lists. I promise you I left a lot on the cutting room floor! 

In fact, at the start of this financial year we had more than 50 rule changes either pending or commenced – that’s double the average number submitted to us annually in recent years.  

Typically, we can complete 15 to 20 rule changes per annum, depending on the complexity of the rule change and other priorities.  However, given the pace and scale of change we’re all trying to achieve at this stage of the energy transition, we know some stakeholders are frustrated with how quickly we’re undertaking the work.

So, our self-imposed target for 2024-25 will be to complete 25 rule changes and five reviews – a 30% increase on our rule change throughput in the past two years.  You will see us adopting some different approaches to our work, but in those cases we will be clear up front so you know what to expect.

Some of you here today may have been part of the consultation that helped us develop the work plan for 2024-25, and if you’re interested you’ll also find the details on our website 2024-25 AEMC high-level work program

Pricing review

Now as promised, I’ll wrap this up with where we are at for the work I suspect many of you are most interested in, our Pricing review: Electricity pricing for a consumer-driven future.

In early November, we published the consultation paper and final terms of reference for this comprehensive review, so if you haven’t already, please take a look at those documents as soon as you can – we very much value your input as we work to complete this by April next year. 

This is about designing a pricing framework that better serves Australian energy consumers. We will examine how markets and regulatory frameworks can provide the products and services that benefit all consumers, now and into the future. 

It comes as technological change is reshaping how Australians use and pay for electricity, with solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles becoming commonplace.  

That said, this is a review not a rule change, and we’re taking a very future-oriented approach that does not delve into the specific issues of today. Instead, it’s an opportunity to consider the future needs of consumers and how market and regulatory arrangements could be evolved to better serve them.

We recognise this may be challenging for people seeking fixes for known pain points with the way things are done now. 

We don’t want to discount the importance of these issues. However, at this stage of the review, we are asking ourselves and our stakeholders to forget traditional thinking and adopt a longer-term perspective – what are the really significant reform opportunities that will set consumers, retailers and the sector up for a more successful journey to net zero?

The retailer evolution 

Because… if the way we retail power to people is not massively changed in 10 years time, your businesses may not exist. 

Consumers are clearly not satisfied with the way they receive energy from the sector, and you retailers bear the brunt of that dissatisfaction because they ‘own’ the customers. 

And – absolutely - many retailers are making changes, looking ahead and evolving to meet the new market, where CER is a more and more crucial force.

The rise of CER is not just about the technology, it’s about customers wanting to create a distance from retailers in order to generate savings. 

Increasingly, home management and automation services will take that distance a step further. Make it easier for consumers to minimise their retail relationship with you. Promise your customers the solutions they cannot currently find. 

Whether those CER-owning customers are currently – as our chair Anna Collyer described them – ‘obsessed, in a mess, or couldn’t care less’ – you can be sure there will be a management business pitching them a more seamless digital experience than retailers currently offer.

Conclusion 

Retailers definitely can continue to have an important role, but it certainly won’t be as simple as buying chunks of energy and selling it on to households and businesses.

How will you be prepared to support customers as we move from centralised to distributed generation? From 20 or so generators to millions of sources across utilities and rooftops?

How central are customers today – really – for your businesses? How seamless are you making it for them to bring their private generation and storage technology into the shared grid? 

What products do you currently offer that you expect to abandon in the next couple of years? And how many do you think will survive another decade, let alone 20 years? 

To quote Anna again, will your business be an Apple or a Kodak? 

When customers are overwhelmingly tapping into personal or community based CER, when they have access to both smart meters and real-time data, when they have third-party management services sorting out their pool pumps from their hot water heaters – how compelling will your offers be?

Again, I invite you to join the consultation for our Pricing Review – our first submissions for consultation close on 21 December – and help us with this thinking, for everyone’s benefit.

Thank you.