The Justice and Equity Centre made a submission to the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water’s NSW Transmission Planning Review Options paper.
The review aims to reduce the redundancy in roles and planning documents in the NSW transmission planning regime, to increase NSW planners’ capacity to engage with the planners at the National level and from other jurisdictions, and improve the requirements for transmission planners to consult with consumers and other stakeholders.
The JEC supports all of these ambitions. We proposed adding to the problem definition to further elements: first the need for planners to have greater capacity to analyse the future of the grid and assess the value of different investment options in light of this analysis; and second, the importance of cost recovery issues to assessing different options for a new planning regime. This is a point that the Panel had agreed with us following us raising it in an earlier submission. We will continue working with the Panel to identify pathways forward that allow improvements to NSW transmission planning without exacerbating the inequities and inefficiencies that fall from the Roadmap cost recovery arrangements.
We provided responses to a large number of options for reform identified by the Panel, favouring options that remove the conflict of interest Transgrid currently faces as both a planner and provider of services, and options that place responsibility and accountability for planning on a single actor.
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