Price Rise Precursor

What does a network price change even mean?

Electricity bills comprise wholesale costs, network charges, and retail margins.

As energy consumers, we're generally not that interested in the detailed breakdown between these components — we only care about the final bill price. But each component matters and contributes toward our bills.

The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) today approved the electricity distributors’ annual pricing proposals for network charges in 2023-24.

Distributors operate as regulated monopolies, with network pricing governed by the AER. Electricity distributors must present their network pricing proposals to the AER every year for approval, with the new pricing rolling out on 1 July every year.

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The AER annual pricing review relates only to the network charge component of a retail electricity bill.

Estimated Electricity Network price change 2023-24

Here's a quick summary of the estimated increase or decrease in the network component of the 'typical bill' for Residential and SME Business customers in each zone.

State	Distribution zone	Residential	SME business
NSW	Ausgrid	$24.55	$52.92
NSW	Endeavour Energy	21.56	$45/76
NSW	Essential Energy	$90.97	$167.18
VIC	Citipower	$2.39	$7.14
VIC	Jemena	$33.70	$120.39
VIC	United Energy	$18.99	$34.92
VIC	Powercor	$31.14	$44.10
VIC	Ausnet Services	$29.63	$66.64
QLD	Energex	$39.31	$42.04
QLD	Ergon	-$2.23	$9.67
SA	SA Power Networks	$12.54	$58.56
TAS	TasNetworks	$17.40	$41.65
ACT	Evoenergy	-$257.31	-$760.55
NT	Power and Water Corporation	$211.44	$187.10

The most notable price change for the coming year is in ACT Evoeneregy, where network pricing is estimated to decrease by $257.31 for typical residential bills, and by a whopping $760.55 for SME.

AER's 'Statement of Reasons: Evoenergy's Pricing Proposal' says:

The decrease in revenue is predominantly due to the operation of the ACT government’s large-scale feed-in tariff jurisdictional scheme. Evoenergy has typically recovered costs from its customers in the past under the scheme but this year it does not need to recover costs because the scheme is in surplus. This is partially offset by higher-than-forecast inflation.

It looks like ACT's 100% Renewable energy strategy is paying off.

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More information on the changes in network charges can be found in the 'Statement of Reasons', which AER publishes for each electricity distributor.