The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) has released draft guidelines for consultation that will govern how distributors should develop and justify two-way export tariff proposals.
The AER is required to make Export Tariff Guidelines under the Australian Energy Market Commission’s recent Access, pricing and incentive arrangements for distributed energy resources rule change. The rule change aims to facilitate small-scale solar into the grid and support the growth of batteries and electric vehicles. It also allows the ability for network energy businesses to propose two-way tariff pricing that may only be implemented following approval from the AER.
The draft Export Tariff Guidelines (draft Guidelines) include guidance on:
- customer protections and the need for any two-way pricing proposals to be justified
- the potential structure of any two-way pricing proposals
- the AER’s process for approving or not approving any two-way pricing proposals
- the AER’s expectations of networks to consult with their customers if they plan to introduce two-way pricing
- the basic export level, or free export service, which must accompany any two-way pricing proposals.
The draft Guidelines are accompanied by an explanatory statement which explains how the AER considered stakeholder feedback on the Export Tariff Guidelines consultation paper.
Invitation for submissions
Consultation on the draft Guidelines and explanatory statement is open until 8 March 2022. Feedback will be used to inform the final Export Tariff Guidelines, due to be published in May 2022. Any two-way pricing proposals will not take effect until 2025 at the earliest, later for customers in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.