From the CEO
If you were unable to join us, last week we hosted our annual Foresighting Forum. And if you’ll permit me, I think it was a fabulous success – and for that I want to publicly acknowledge the leadership of Jacqueline Crawshaw and the team at Energy Consumers Australia.
Over the course of the event, as Lou Reed might say, we took a walk on the demand side.
We invited attendees to think, speak, act, and dream like a consumer. To consider how consumers currently engage with the system. What they want, value, and expect from any future system. And how we can best enable consumers to participate to create a thriving energy system that benefits everyone.
How did we end up there?
Our energy system is rapidly changing as we move towards a smarter, low-carbon energy system. Much focus has been placed on how we can ensure that this power is delivered safely, and reliably, now and into the future. And rightly so.
But what has been, for the most part, missing from this conversation is how we must also reshape and rethink demand. To make less costly, investment in generation and networks, we must cast our minds more broadly and contemplate what measures such as energy efficiency, fuel switching, load shifting, and behaviour change can also bring.
And what do each of these measures have in common? People. People complete with their complexities, diverse motivations, and opportunities to participate. No matter how hard some might try, we simply can’t engineer people out of the system.
This means the tired, old way of thinking that sees consumers as either meddlesome interferences, or what I like to call “imaginary friends,” needs to change. The success of the transition will depend on having a clear picture about when, where, and why consumers use energy. And that requires speaking to real people about their lived experiences.
And the Forum definitely delivered on this.
One of the innovations of this Forum was to hear throughout from consumer advocates as part of our Consumer Voices Panel. As one of our advocate colleagues Rebecca Law from SACOSS challenged us, "We need to bring consumer voices back into the conversation." We had the privilege of learning from the lived experiences of First Nations people, renters, small businesses, agribusinesses, low socio-economic households, older Australians, and more. These advocates were generous with their time and experiences. And encouraged us to start designing the system to capture the diverse needs and values of the consumer.
This is not going to be easy. As David Harding from Business NSW reminded us, “Australia faces the biggest change management challenge of its history”. And as we transition, we must ensure that everyone gets brought along on the journey and that no one is left behind. Or in Anna Collyer from the AEMC’s words, “"We can't accept a growing divide as we transition to net zero."
But the good news is, as Professor Yolande Strengers from Monash University shared, "People are interested in a much broader range of participation in the energy system than is currently being considered." Our challenge then is to reflect how we can facilitate and enable this. Because if we’re not careful, we’ll miss the opportunity to engage people along the way. In UNSW’s Mike Roberts’ words, “We need these consumers and we need to win their hearts and minds. We need them to care."
Two major themes emerged during the discussions about how to achieve this. The first was the need to rebuild trust for consumers and establish social license. And the second, was the need to create a common and shared language that empowers consumers, and to start speaking about the solutions in human terms. Because, as Joel Dignam from Better Renting reminded us, “most consumers don’t know their NMI from the NEM.”
The Forum left me with a renewed belief that consumers are indeed one of our greatest assets. And that if we begin to start designing our future energy system to harness this, our system will be more secure, reliable and resilient and deliver affordability.
This framing and belief are something that here at Energy Consumers Australia we’ll keep coming back to and championing in 2023. But this is not something that we can do on our own.
It requires attention and input from people and organisations across the board. We’ll need planners, retailers, policy makers, consumer advocates, researchers, innovators, decision makers, and so much more to each play their part.
This sense of partnership will be required as we implement and tackle a whole range of issues this year such as realising the benefits of investment in technology, improving the energy performance of their homes, electrifying heating and transport, and through adaptive behaviour change. Not to mention the National Energy Performance Strategy, a national Energy Savings Campaign initiative, and the rising cost of energy bills – to name just a few. These are big, complex issues that require ongoing, robust discussions where we continue to place consumers at the centre; and is something we’ll be bringing before the Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council tomorrow.
To finish, I want to leave you with the same challenge that I issued to participants as they began the Forum: What’s my role in ensuring there’s a plan to maximise consumer outcomes? What’s the one thing I can do to ensure that at the end of the day, consumers are better off?
This is a transformation like no other. And it will take all of us, together.
Lynne Gallagher
Chief Executive Officer
