By Bridget Ryan
Every five years, electricity companies and the regulator negotiate the rates that can be charged by electricity suppliers (the distribution businesses) to manage, maintain and supply electricity to businesses and households.
The 2010 negotiations are underway and will set a core part of your electricity bill for the next five years.
Do you think this will have a great impact on your business? Let us know by taking our short online poll or by leaving a comment!
Victoria’s electricity supply companies (distribution businesses) are proposing changes to their tariffs for the next five years which would increase your electricity bill by 17% to 36% over 5 years.
Victorian distribution businesses have proposed X factor (real network price) increases of:
- CitiPower: 10.1% in the first year and 8% in the remaining years
- Jemena: 39.6% in the first year and 3% in the remaining years
- Powercor: 22.3% in the first year and 5% in the remaining years
- SP AusNet: 46.2% in the first year and 5.5% in the remaining years
- United Energy: 16.8% in the first year and 4% in the remaining years.
Note that these changes relate to the network charges and account for up to about 40% of the total electricity bill. Please take our short survey to let us know your opinions of the following core issues surrounding this topic:
During the next five years, electricity tariffs may change to “time of use” structures which will result in higher tariffs in “peak” times (eg. 2pm-6pm) and lower tariffs in “off peak” times (eg. overnight).
Some electricity suppliers are proposing critical peak pricing arrangements that would provide you with short notice of a much higher ‘peak price’ to encourage you to reduce consumption for a few hours.
In addition to this short survey, VECCI is also seeking further input from Victorian business and industry. If you would like to provide more detailed feedback on this issue, please contact me on 03 8662 5225 or email bryan@vecci.org.au.
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Here in Victoria, we are almost totally dependent on coal fired electricity. It requires massive infrastructure, huge numbers of people to run (highly unionised), and leaves our power supply reliant upon a small number of key power stations. While we just had a cool summer (relatively), we still had rolling power outages on hot days, and this will only get worse.
I would like to see business offered options for Green Power, specifically from wind. I would like to see the several billions of federal money which is handed to the coal industry redirected to Wind Power, which is cheap, simple, and requires almost no personnel to run. As witnessed by the large takeup in recent years, wind farms are making money and providing a return on investment within a few years.
We are constantly told wind power is expensive compared to coal, and the electricity will stop if there is no wind. BOTH OF THESE STATEMENTS ARE INCORRECT AND DRIVEN FROM INTEREST GROUPS SUPPORTING COAL. Think about it: coal requires hundreds of people digging up coal, running boilers, repairing equipment; wind power requires a maintenance guy with a paint brush and an oil can (simplistic, but not far from the truth).
Wind power will REDUCE our electricity costs long term, and remove the risk of a single plant failure causing blackouts. It is dramatically simpler and cheaper than coal.