2024-29 Regulatory Reset

Every five years, Ausgrid is required to submit a plan to the national regulator for electricity and gas networks, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), detailing our proposed services, costs, and prices for the next five years. The AER’s role is to review our proposal to ensure it reflects the services our customers value at the lowest sustainable cost. Our current regulatory period is from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2029.

In developing our current regulatory proposal, we engaged extensively with our customers and stakeholders on what they value and their priorities for the future, with their feedback helping shape our proposal. 

The AER has made its final decision for Ausgrid for 2024-2029, which you can find here. This final decision concludes over two and a half years of work to determine the revenue we can recover from our customers for the 2024-29 period.

Ausgrid's plan for 2024-29

In recognition of the energy transition to renewables, our 2024-29 plan focuses on delivering resilient, affordable and clean power to our communities. Many key elements of our plan reflect our customers' cost-of-living concerns, including:

• our operating costs (opex) are reflective of an efficient business. Compared to 2015, our opex has seen a substantial reduction
• our replacement capital expenditure (repex), making up a large proportion of our total capital expenditure (capex), significantly outperforms the AER's repex model
• our approved capex is less than our previous period's spend
• while committed to achieving the highest level of protection, we reduced our cyber security program through efficiency savings.

We also considered a wider range of options to efficiently and prudently respond to the growing impact of storms on our network.

Finally, our 2024-29 plan sets out our network tariffs for these years. Our tariff strategy recognises the benefits associated with the rollout of smart meters. Further, our tariff assignments ensure that customers with smart meters will be assigned to a cost-reflective tariff, which provides incentives to reduce pressure on our network during peak demand periods. Further details can be found in Understanding Tariffs.

Determining the right path for the future of energy is important but challenging. We are grateful for the feedback our customers and stakeholders provided during our engagement. It has helped shape our services and the grid of the future that will meet our customers' needs.