The Justice and Equity Centre (JEC) made a submission to the Australian Energy Regulator’s (AER) draft decision regarding the 2024 Value of Network Resilience (VNR). The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events affects electricity supply and requires that network businesses enhance their responses to long-duration outages. However, a fixed value for the VNR does not effectively address these issues and as such should only apply to the current revenue determinations for Victorian DNSPs. Linking the VNR to the Value of Customer Reliability (VCR) could inflate electricity costs without ensuring funds address the issues related to resilience that matter most to consumers. The JEC recommends that expenditures on network improvements be more clearly defined to differentiate between resilience and reliability expenditure and that this expenditure be informed by consumer risk preferences as they relate to long-duration outages.
