2020-2025 Draft Plan Consultation NOW CLOSED

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Consultation has concluded

How we plan to manage South Australia’s distribution network into the future is outlined in our 2020—2025 Draft Plan, which was released for consultation on 8 August 2018. This document has been informed by comprehensive customer and stakeholder engagement, and its release marks a key milestone in our program to develop our full Regulatory Proposal for 2020-2025.

You can:

Our consultation period was open until 5pm Wednesday 19 September 2018. We welcomed your responses to the questions throughout the Plan, or any other feedback you wished to provide. We are now collating this data and submissions will be published on this website soon.

Your feedback will help us shape and refine our approach as we continue to prepare our 2020-2025 Regulatory Proposal, due to the Australian Energy Regulator in early 2019.

See all feedback on our 2020-2025 Draft Plan here.


How we plan to manage South Australia’s distribution network into the future is outlined in our 2020—2025 Draft Plan, which was released for consultation on 8 August 2018. This document has been informed by comprehensive customer and stakeholder engagement, and its release marks a key milestone in our program to develop our full Regulatory Proposal for 2020-2025.

You can:

Our consultation period was open until 5pm Wednesday 19 September 2018. We welcomed your responses to the questions throughout the Plan, or any other feedback you wished to provide. We are now collating this data and submissions will be published on this website soon.

Your feedback will help us shape and refine our approach as we continue to prepare our 2020-2025 Regulatory Proposal, due to the Australian Energy Regulator in early 2019.

See all feedback on our 2020-2025 Draft Plan here.


Consultation has concluded
  • Investing capital prudently in our network and systems

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    We developed our 2020-2025 capex plans with comprehensive input from our customers and stakeholders. Feedback from our customers is that they want us to:

    • do our part to keep a lid on prices;
    • maintain electricity supply reliability across the State; and
    • continue a managed transition to the ‘network of the future’.


    DID YOU KNOW?

    Pole-plating can extend a Stobie pole’s life by 50% and only costs 15% of replacing a pole!

    In 2017, instead of replacing poles at an average cost of $10,000 each, we refurbished around 5,300 poles at an average cost of $1,270 each, saving $46 million in capex!


    As we engaged with our customers and stakeholders, they consistently asked us to ‘do more for less’. We have a track record for doing more for less and we plan to continue this into the next regulatory period by continuing the drive for efficiency and delivering better outcomes for our customers at a lower price.

    During 2020–2025 we will continue to meet all of our regulatory obligations to maintain the quality, reliability, safety and security of the distribution network; connect or upgrade customers; and improve customer service outcomes. In addition, we propose to deliver targeted improvements in:

    • supply reliability for poorly-served customers;
    • bushfire risk reduction;
    • management of our ageing network assets;
    • cyber security protections for customer and business information; and
    • enabling the transition to a distributed energy future.

    We also have ‘non-network’ expenditure centred around IT, our fleet, property and telecommunications, which all enable our work and ensure we can continue to deliver safe and reliable electricity for South Australians.

    Take a look at Chapter 6 of the Draft Plan and let us know your thoughts on our capital expenditure.


  • Maintaining our operating expenditure at efficient levels

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    Do you want to understand the key components of our operating expenditure (opex) forecast? Opex relates to money spent maintaining and operating the assets that make up and support the electricity distribution system. Basically, the poles, wires, transformers and substations that deliver electricity to your homes and businesses must be maintained to enable a safe and reliable system.

    This may include:

    • annual and/or cyclical programs to manage vegetation around powerlines to mitigate risk and maintain reliability;

    • restoring supply from unplanned outages caused by extreme weather events, equipment failure or third-party damage, and the inconvenience payments to customers that result from them exceeding the levels of service set by Essential Services Commission of South Australia; and

    • customer service and business support costs.

    Chapter 7 of the 2020-2025 Draft Plan also explains how we develop a total forecast using the Australian Energy Regulator’s preferred ‘base-step-trend’ methodology; and how we’ve reduced our forecast expenditure in response to customer and stakeholder feedback. Please take the time to read the Draft Plan on the Talking Power website.


  • What do you think about our plans to enable the distributed energy transition?

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    It is easy to forget that as recently as ten years ago it was extremely unusual to see a solar panel on a roof in South Australia. In 2018, it’s a very different picture! With one in four premises now with solar and a network that was originally designed for one-way flows of electricity, we have been thinking about how best to accommodate our customers’ changing needs. This includes ensuring the network has the capacity to continue to support the uptake of solar, as well as new technologies like residential battery storage systems.


    Moving from centralised to de-centralised generation has its opportunities, but also its challenges. Our network was not designed to transport energy in two directions, and each part of the network has a limited capacity to accommodate the connection of distributed energy resources like solar and batteries before technical issues arise. As solar penetration in a local area begins to exceed capacity limits, customers can experience over-voltage at times of high export, causing inverters to trip off. Eventually, reverse energy flows in the middle of the day can become high enough to exceed the rating of transformers or other assets, which can cause localised power outages. These challenges can be exacerbated by ‘virtual power plants’ (where many individual batteries are aggregated under central control), which can cause very large swings in energy flows within the local network.

    We want to ensure customers can continue to connect resources like solar and battery systems to the network, and are proposing work programs in 2020-2025 that will give us greater visibility of the network to ensure we can better manage these two-way energy flows. Check out Chapter 5 of the Draft Plan and let us know what you think about our approach!