Getting off gas
The AEMC’s draft would require the AER to approve a gas network’s plan to bring forward cost recovery unless it shows a better alternative, and the AEMC says today’s gas customers would pay more. The AER says the presumption risks consumer harm. In the last round it allowed $495 million of the $826 million six household networks asked for.
Policy
Introduced on 28 October: the AER could be sent, with compulsory powers and a deadline, into a named market. The memorandum lists embedded networks, virtual power plants and EV charging. Reports are public unless the minister directs otherwise.
Batteries
Last quarter AEMO compared 10,000 battery homes with 10,000 solar-only homes. This quarter it used about 0.5 million and 1.9 million, and the answer barely moved: 0.7 kW less from the grid between 4pm and 9pm.
Batteries
The regulator’s own before-and-after split: the 14 to 28 kWh band went from 35.6 to 56.6 per cent of rebated batteries, and retrofits onto existing solar fell from about half to about two in five.
Policy
The minimum debt for disconnection in Victoria rose from $300 to $1,000. Retailers must switch customers on tailored assistance, or three months behind with $1,000 or more owing, to their best offer unless they opt out within 10 business days.
Policy
In NSW, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, the minimum disconnection amount will apply to all customers, and retailers must try at least two ways of reaching you. Submissions on a draft evidence ban closed 22 October; a decision is due 3 December.
Policy
The plan with three free hours of power a day is one you ask for. Since 8 August, not having it available, or putting you on it without your agreement, each carry a civil penalty of 300 penalty units.
Solar
The mid-scale solar regulations are in force from 1 October. A business array installed in 2029 is credited with five years of generation; a house installed that year, two. Your own rooftop support does not change.
EVs & charging
A bill introduced on 27 October would replace the FBT exemption for electric cars committed from 1 April 2027 with a discount: 100 per cent at $75,000 or less until April 2029, otherwise 25 per cent. A refinance or a new employer counts as a new commitment. Not yet law.
Getting off gas
Since 1 October, gas networks covered by a national rule must publish what disconnecting and abolishing a connection cost. Jemena’s NSW page prices an abolishment with no building work planned at $284.99.
EVs & charging
27,089 battery-electric vehicles in August, the highest number in one month, at 24.9 per cent of the entire market. September’s share was 24.2 per cent, against 11.3 per cent a year earlier.
EVs & charging
Networks that win federal grants would recover around 70 per cent of the cost of regional fast chargers and last-resort kerbside chargers through network charges, capped. A draft: submissions close 5 November.
Policy
Energy ministers have endorsed the national rulebook for household solar inverters, batteries and EV chargers: certified products, registered suppliers, accredited installers and a switch-on gate. Nothing you own now is covered, and no mandatory date is set yet.
Bills
Free electricity from 11am to 2pm, opt-in through your retailer. Use more than about 11 per cent of your power in that window and you beat the default time-of-use offer; use less and you pay about 2c a kWh more on everything else.
Data
ARENA's first portfolio data report: 23 installed of 284 planned, $480m of capex, and interval data showing some batteries charging when voltage is low and discharging when it is high.
Data
The emissions case held across both years. The electricity-use case reversed. And the report says plainly its own sample cannot settle it either way.
Rebates
SAA accreditation and the Clean Energy Council list are conditions of the money. The consumer code covering sales, quotes and warranties is one you can choose.
Rebates
Only products on the Clean Energy Council’s approved lists earn certificates, and the lists are dynamic. Eligibility is judged on the installation date, not the quote date.
Hot water
Four product types out of the GEMS register: 167 fields and ten ratings for an air conditioner, 32 fields and none for an electric water heater. Zero heat pumps in 2,163 water heater registrations.
Explainer
Joining roughly doubles the bill benefit of a battery. It also puts your hardware outside the ombudsman's reach in many cases, and the brand on your wall decides which plants will even take you. The ACCC found all three.
Bills
The ABS release of 26 August attributes both the rise and its collapse to government rebates rather than to the price of electricity. Measured electricity prices fell 1.6 per cent in the month most bills were reset upward, and the release does not explain why.
Batteries
AEMO’s 2026 Integrated System Plan takes small-scale batteries from 5 GW in April 2026 to 35 GW by 2050, assumes just over half of them are coordinated in a VPP, and books up to $5 billion of avoided utility-scale storage against it. The same section says the consumer trust for that is not yet there.
Explainer
Apartment blocks, retirement villages and caravan parks are excluded from the definition of a customer in the price cap rules, so the Default Market Offer is not theirs. The AER’s own determination says that changes from DMO 9.
Hot water
Water heating is about a quarter of what a home uses. The two systems public money pays you to install are the two with no efficiency requirement at all, and no water heater sold here has to carry an Energy Rating Label.
Explainer
AEMC, AER, AEMO, CER. Only three of them are energy market bodies, and the odd one out is the body behind your solar and battery rebate. Which one does what, in each body’s own words, and which one to go to.
Solar
A registered agent is who turns your install into the certificates that pay for the discount on your quote. One has just lost its registration permanently, and the notice carries a wider warning about associations with people already disqualified.
Solar
Solar up to 1 MW joins the certificate scheme from 1 October, aimed at warehouses, farms, schools and hospitals. Solar certificates count in the percentage retailers must meet; the regulator says in terms that battery certificates do not.
Policy
Four linked obligations on new data centres above a threshold size: buy new renewables through REGO, prove firm cover to the AER, register as a market participant, run flexibly. Advice, not rules, and nobody has costed what it does to a household bill.
The Grid
New minimum demand records in South Australia and Victoria, a 72.2 per cent all-time renewables peak, and midday negative prices getting both rarer and shallower as batteries soak up the surplus. What the daytime grid records mean for a household.
Policy
Ausgrid $254.23m, Endeavour $221.40m, Essential $117.53m, recovered through approved 2026-27 network charges. The determination is settled; comment on the method that produces it closed on 19 August, and the AER expects the final guideline in September.
Policy
Endeavour, Essential and Ausgrid have applied to recover the cost of building remote solar curtailment under the NSW Emergency Backstop Mechanism. The AER takes submissions to 21 August, and its notice says that if none arrive the amount proposed is taken to be the approved amount.
Policy
Whether networks may build kerbside chargers is the AEMC’s call. Whether the cost lands on every bill or only on the drivers who plug in is the AER’s, at a later stage, with far less attention on it. Consumer advocates have put that second decision on the record.
Policy
Energy Networks Australia wants distribution networks allowed to run kerbside EV chargers as a regulated service, recovered through network charges on everyone’s bill. Nexa Advisory wants the competitors protected instead. Both sit inside the AEMC’s new network regulation review. Submissions closed 23 July; the Sydney forum was held 18 August.
Grid
On 22 July the federal government announced $30 million for 14 projects under a new Grid Enhancing Technologies grant. The two it headlined are the ones households cannot buy yet: shared solar for apartments, and the electric car used as a home battery. Funded pilots, not a rebate you can claim.
Rebates
The Energy Bill Relief Fund ended on 31 December 2025 and no 2026 round has been announced; the government's own energy site now points households to state concession schemes instead. What the credit stream was worth, and the one lever every household still holds.
Policy
The AEMC has made a final rule on how life support customers register and get told about outages, from December 2027. Existing protections are identical and no re-registration is needed. What changes: choice of contact method, an emergency contact person, annual check-ins, and retailers must ask every new customer.
Policy
On 16 July the AEMC made a final rule forcing distribution networks to plan on a 20-year horizon and publish data on the low-voltage grid, the street-level wires where your solar, battery and EV charger connect. Plumbing, not a rebate, but it targets the blind spot that limits what your solar can earn.
Batteries
The market operator compared 10,000 solar-only households against 10,000 with a battery. Battery homes drew 0.7 kW less from the grid between 4pm and 9pm, and there are now enough of them to bend the national demand curve.
Batteries
Solar-and-battery homes paid $329 to $909 less a year, and battery-plus-VPP homes $762 to $1,093 less, the competition regulator found, off 402,700 installs under the federal program. It also warns the consumer protections have not kept pace.
Policy
Loyal customers pay $221 a year more, the ACCC found. The rule-maker's draft fix was dropped for a disclosure rule; nine consumer groups say that leaves the work with the customer. We read the AEMC's 184-page final report for what it actually decided and why.
Bills
Benchmark prices fell in NSW, south east Queensland, Victoria and regional Queensland, and rose in SA and WA. There is no national power price, only five different resets under five different laws, and your region's number is in one table with its assumptions shown.
Rebates
Full support stops at 14 kWh. A 20 kWh quote gets 88 per cent of the old flat-rate treatment, and any guide still quoting a flat 30 per cent off any size is out of date.
Policy
The new opt-in offer needs no solar panels, and the regulator's own modelling shows it can also produce a higher bill.
Solar
Three changes are named by the administrator. A fourth, in the annexure, turns an unqualified duty to investigate a customer complaint into a qualified one. The clauses you would read are word for word identical, and only the seller can appeal.
EVs & charging
21.7 per cent, down from June’s 23.3. Plus the denominator gap that makes 23,510 of 103,656 come out at 21.7 rather than 22.7.
EVs & charging
Which definition and which denominator each headline uses, and the one thing every measure agrees on.
The record
Five ACCC recalls now cover electrification hardware, including an EV wall charger recalled days ago. Model by model, with what to do.
Getting off gas
All-electric new homes from 1 January 2027, no like-for-like gas hot water replacement in existing homes from 1 March 2027 (with exceptions), and two things the regulations deliberately do not touch: your cooktop, and your heater if you own your home.
Contact
Rebates step down, determinations land, scheme pages quietly change. If you have spotted something we should verify, send a tip; identity optional, evidence welcome. Every figure on this site carries its checked date, and how this site works explains the whole method, including who pays for it (nobody we cover).
