Media release – Australian Energy Regulator (AER), 30 April 2024
Australian Energy Regulator Final Determination 2024-29
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) has approved TasNetworks’ final 2024-29 regulatory proposal, developed through detailed consultation with customers and stakeholders over several years.
The AER’s decision sets TasNetworks’ allowed revenue to build, operate and maintain Tasmania’s distribution and transmission electricity networks for the coming five-year regulatory period.
The AER’s decision also includes an avenue to facilitate multiple transmission projects in support of the Tasmanian Government’s Renewable Energy Target (TRET). The AER’s final determination is available from the AER’s website here.
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Ben Marshall
April 30, 2024 at 12:24
In case anyone’s wondering, this is the financial green light from the Tasmanian Renewable Energy Target (TRET) on the vast new grid across our north west that is one half of Project Marinus, thereby allowing Tasnetworks to add the cost of it all to our power bills to our share of the Link and the new grid backing it.
The new grid, the North West Transmission Development(the NWTD) is designed to ‘create investment opportunities’, that is, to attract global renewables corporations to build wind farms here to ‘lower power prices in Victoria’ which is to gamble on the premise that so many new renewable energy projects will take advantage of our free wind energy, and a brand new grid to ship that energy to the Mainland, and a guaranteed profit via sales to power-trading company TasHydro, so that the extra energy will then ‘flood the market’ and lower prices here when TasHydro speculates on the Market and buys it back.
This is all hypothetically possible but incredibly inefficient, and it’s largely an ad hoc plan that’s 90% Public Relations and 10% magical thinking. Either way, there won’t be any of the promised benefits to Tasmania, for example ‘jobs and growth’, ‘downward pressure on power prices’ and ‘action on climate’, etc.
Tasnetworks is already gouging our power bills via supernormal profit-taking, and it’s hoping we won’t notice that our bills going up for the North West Transmission Development. It’s got the Liberal-Labor party backing it, and Federal Labor is gagging for any and all new renewable energy no matter the cost or the corruption so Tasnetworks, already Jurisdictional Planner of the Energy sector, can do whatever it likes.
Politicians, mired in last-century’s neoliberal market economics’ thinking, and so besieged by slick corporate PR assuring them that ‘jobs and growth’ promises will get them re-elected, that they’re incapable and disinterested in actually planning on behalf of our State. The idea is that if they’re in government they’ll get a return from the profiteering, all of it at our expense, being enough to ensure that they look the other way at the costs we, the people and our remaining wild habitats, will pay.
Ben Marshall
April 30, 2024 at 16:28
I should add that the Australian Energy Regulator’s (the AER) highly technical and narrowly focused approvals system doesn’t ask for or need a costs-benefits analysis to provide a green light.
The AER ignores the fact that Tasnetworks’ plans fail on every metric except the most limited, and speculative, commercial criteria. No genuine or independent analysis of Tasnet’s self-interested and self-regulated activity backs their rapacious exploitation of Tasmanian taxpayers and power users, the bulldozing of habitat for even more wedgie-killing transmission lines, the use of old-school overhead transmission lines instead of undergrounding, the complete disregard for our changing and more extreme climate, and the reduction of grid resilience by running lines through fire-prone forests.
Meanwhile, Tasnet’s uncosted PR campaign, now four years old, continues with cash splashes, small grants and donations to worthy causes, and pop-up “information booths” at every festival it can pay to host them, while all of the costs paid to the PR companies running this bollocks comes from our power bills.