Average residential electricity bills in the ACT will rise by only $75 a year from July, with the independent pricing regulator signing off on a maximum 4.15% increase to standing offers. The average commercial electricity bill would only increase by $289 each year, largely driven by increases to wholesale energy prices.
The ACT’s Independent Competition and Regulatory Commission’s (ICRC) senior commissioner Joe Dimasi said, “The ACT will have the smallest price increase among jurisdictions in the national electricity market. The average annual bill for Canberrans on standing offers will be the lowest compared to the default market offers faced by customers in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, where residential customers are facing increases in the order of 20% to 27%.”
The ACT government pays a contract price to renewable electricity generators for all of the electricity fed into the ACT grid which has been 100% renewable since 2020. When wholesale spot prices for electricity are above the contract price, the generators return their earnings above the contract price to Evoenergy, which manages the scheme on behalf of the ACT government.
And on 8 June, the ACT Legislative Assembly passed the Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Natural Gas Transition) Amendment Bill which requires all fossil fuel gas connections to cease before 2045, the same date as the territory’s net zero emissions target.
This is no small thing. According to Evoenergy, the Territory’s gas distributor, there are currently around 139,000 gas mains connections in the ACT, with 80 per cent of all new homes still connecting to the fossil gas network. Over the 2019-2021 period, Evoenergy reported 8,910 new connections – almost 3,000 new connections per year.
Victoria follows not too far behind with the Labor government’s “gas substitution roadmap” which at this stage is incentivising households to invest in efficient electric alternatives to gas for home heating and hot water.