This message first appeared in our September 2024 newsletter. To stay up to date with the latest news and research on energy issues that impact consumers, sign up to receive our monthly newsletter today.
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A couple of weeks ago I travelled on Sydney’s new Metro system for the first time. The new stations have all the grandeur of secular cathedrals, inviting and escorting enormous crowds silently and speedily across the city. The experience is as efficient as it is elegant, and it made me feel, well, proud.
Why? Because here was an investment in modern, democratising infrastructure from which everyone in the city, and many others across the country, can benefit. The best infrastructure programs, it seems to me, are those that distribute rather than concentrate opportunity.
The energy transition is a case in point. The key criterion for its success will be how effectively it shares benefits and costs – and not just in the traditional way between consumers and industry. No, policy makers will increasingly have to balance competing interests between consumers themselves.
Between those who can mitigate high energy prices by investing in their own energy resources (and who rightly want a return on money they could have spent elsewhere), and those who can’t. Between those who can shift consumption away from peak times, and those for whom that is not an option. Between those who can chase a cheaper energy deal, and those unable to. Between those with seemingly uninterrupted supply, and those without.
I have profound respect for everyone working to balance these interests. It’s enormously complex, of course, but also deeply sensitive because every decision made involves some level of trade-off from which certain consumers will benefit and others will not. The trick will be in carefully balancing these decisions, so that the system doesn’t merely cater to the most agile or well-resourced, but understands the varying needs and capacities of all Australians.
Just like at the new Metro stations, we need stairs, escalators, and all-access lifts. Ultimately, the true test of the system will be not just how innovative or economically efficient it is, but by how equitable and inclusive it becomes.
Brendan French
Chief Executive Officer
