The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) last week approved significant electricity price increases starting this month.
Energy prices, according to AER, are regulated under the Default Market Offer (DMO) prices, which is ‘the safety-net price cap that ensures consumers are protected from unjustifiably high prices’.
In a statement on www.aer.gov.au, they said, ‘From July 1, the DMO prices in NSW, south-east Qld and South Australia will increase for households (between 1.7 per cent and 8.2 per cent above inflation) and small businesses (0.2 per cent and 13.5 per cent above inflation), largely owing to significant rises in wholesale electricity costs over the past year’.
Meanwhile, a former Origin Executive says NSW and Qld residents are seeing the biggest per cent increases, ‘because they still rely heavily on expensive gas and coal, and their old coal power stations increasingly fail’.
SA leads renewables
Andrew Stock, who is also a former Director of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, said in a press release, ‘South Australia, which has much more renewable electricity, sees far lower increases, and expensive gas is the main reason for the increase there too.’
‘The previous federal government stalled the transition to renewables wherever possible, causing investment in large scale new renewable capacity to collapse, [and they] backed fossil fuel expansion, and put off coal closure’.
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