Daniel Mercer

price attached to the electricity they were using.

And as you point out, the people who have a solar array on their house and they have a battery, they still need to be connected with the poles and wires because they might need it when they don't have enough electricity stored in their battery and the sun isn't shining, for example, or they want to actually sell it back into the grid.

But how do you price that fairly

so that they are contributing to the upkeep of these poles and wires, which yes, they are a fixed cost in the sense that there's a big network already in place, but they also take a huge amount of maintenance, don't they?

And you also need to be putting them in new places.

Well, I think you've got on one hand, right, you've got the people, and I think a lot of people would have been scared by these headlines of thousands of dollars potentially being added to the bills of people who'd gone and purchased their own solar system and their own battery than they would otherwise be paying under the current setup.

those people who have done that investment might think, well, I've done the right thing.

I've done exactly what the government's asked me to do.

I've spent my own money in order to make myself more self-reliant and to help the renewable transition.

And now I'm going to get slugged with this huge fee.

But

they are at the moment receiving a benefit from being connected to that grid, aren't they?

That they're not paying their share of, or at least that's what some people are saying, that they need to be contributing more because otherwise they're effectively being subsidized by everyone else who's using that grid.

And this is one of the things that I think is so interesting about this report.

They're suggesting there are savings to be had.

They can lower the actual cost base.

basically by trying to encourage people using pricing signals to use a grid in a different way about when they're choosing to use electricity.

Because part of the problem, of course, is the volatility and having these really high use peak periods

versus periods where the electricity grid isn't doing as much and that they can use pricing signals to actually get people to kind of smooth out their use of the grid and that will lead to lower costs overall for everyone, right?

Can you explain how that works?