The overall message from this review is that electrification has helped to maintain network residential revenue even though all the consumer consumption growth has come from solar.
Non-residential volumes are flat despite population growth and networks with data centres do show volume growth.
The shift to home batteries will keep the pressure on network volumes and therefore on the regulator to allow price rises. The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) seeks to change this with a shift to fixed pricing. I’m not sure how successful that shift will be. As with locational marginal pricing, community views about AEMC policy do count.
For my money, the fundamental problem is that consumers, retailer and network incentives are not well aligned and indeed the system that separates monopoly from market facing retail may be more of a problem than a solution.
What is for sure is that fixed costs are already quite high in some networks. Amusingly, those networks also tend to have high solar penetration.
