Carrington Clarke

It's the majority of the country's population and economy.

And, you know, in this sort of sprawling electricity system, the AMC is the body that sort of sets the rules that, you know, all the generators have to live by and that sort of sets the rules of the game, as it were.

There are other bodies which sort of do other things, like the Australian Energy Regulator, which is the cop on the beat, so to speak, and the Australian Energy Market Operator, which runs the market itself.

But the AEMC, I mean, these guys make the rules and also give advice to governments.

You're quite right, Carrington.

I think it's probably worth qualifying everything that we're about to talk about by pointing out that it's the networks we're really talking to here.

So the poles and wires companies that transport the electricity from where it's generated to where it's used.

There are obviously other parts of the supply chain that are huge, but we're really talking about the poles and wires here.

Basically, it all comes down to the fact

that the way we're using the electricity system is changing as you just alluded to whereas in the past it was all pretty simple people you know sat at the end of the line and bought power when they needed it from the grid it's now much more complex and a much more dynamic picture and just look at the number of households with solar panels from memory i think there are about four million of them across the country so that's one in every three homes which is a pretty staggering figure

And now, thanks to very generous federal government subsidies, you've got people installing batteries on their homes at a breakneck speed as well.

There are about a quarter of a million of those, according to recent estimates.

And what that means is that many customers are no longer just passive consumers of power as they were in the past.

They're active generators and storers of it as well.

They're players in the game.

The catch is the way we pay for the grid, the poles and wires part of it, that is, that was based on the old model.

And it was a pretty simple model, really.

Consumers would buy a kilowatt hour of electricity from the grid.

And from that money, the poles and wires companies would recover the lion's share of their costs.

There was always a little bit of fixed costs that we paid.