The Energy: Push for consumer duty as energy market grows more complex

Australia’s energy policymakers are edging closer to applying protections for small-scale energy providers as Australia’s boom in home batteries and other consumer energy resources helps build the case for a consumer duty.

“We haven’t had a disaster in this market, so it’s not like we’ve had a banking royal commission and said ‘oh my god, we need to change everything’, but the cost of energy is going up and there’s a call for people to think about how and where they get their energy from,” Melbourne Law School Professor Jeannie Paterson says.

“There’s a potential for the market to work better if we can get people better feed-ins at peak times through virtual power plants or other systems, but none of this is going to work well if we just say to consumers, you take all the risk.”

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Justice and Equity Centre program director for energy Douglas McCloskey says while a retail duty to consumers could be the ideal bridge for protections across existing and newer energy services, it would need to be an augmentation of current protections, not replace them.

“In  a lot of ways, the intent of the current system isn’t being delivered because there are too many ways for retailers to find a loophole or to not act in good faith in delivering the intent of the framework,” he said.

While very supportive of pursuing the opportunity for reform, McCloskey says  it’s really critical to get this type of “seismic” reform right. “We’re very wary of replacing one imperfect thing with something that’s potentially worse.”