Australia’s energy transition is creating more ways for households to generate, store and manage electricity. Yet most consumers do not want to become energy-market experts, or to spend their time comparing complex tariffs, virtual power plants and technology packages.
At Australian Energy Week, a panel moderated by Luminous Consulting energy consultant and executive coach Michael Dart examined how retailers, networks, regulators and policymakers could rebuild trust and make the transition work for a broader range of consumers.
The panel featured Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) Commissioner Sally McMahon, Victorian Essential Services Commission (ESC) Chair Gerard Brody, Alinta Energy Executive Director of Retail Markets Nicole Brolan and Ausgrid Group Customer Executive Fatima Bazzi.
Here are five themes that emerged.
The panel challenged the assumption that a successful energy market requires every household to actively compare products and manage its consumption.
AEMC’s Sally McMahon said consumers should be able to trust the system to deliver reasonable outcomes without constantly participating.
“Consumers should also not be expected or required to engage in that system, unless they want to,” McMahon said. “At the end of the day, what do I want consumers to do? Absolutely nothing, unless they want to, and then if they want to, then we should make sure they can.”
Ausgrid’s Fatima Bazzi agreed that only a small proportion of customers wanted to understand the finer details of batteries, virtual power plants and tariffs.
“The majority of customers want affordable energy, and they want it to be reliable. Fundamentally, they don't care about anything else,” she said.
“They just want us in this room to sort out the rest, figure out the transition, and make sure that when they want to plug in, that their electricity is on and it's working, and that their bill is well priced.”
Retailers are developing products involving rooftop solar, batteries and virtual power plants, but Alinta Energy’s Nicole Brolan warned that innovative technology could easily become a complicated customer proposition.
The challenge has been that this requires very careful design to not be translated into complex solutions for customers, she added.
For retailers, this means looking beyond the price or product advertised and considering the entire customer journey, particularly when households are making major decisions about solar, storage or electrification.
“It is about the offerings being incredibly simple, where the value is very clear to the consumer,” Brolan said. “But it’s also about the whole end-to-end experience of how a consumer goes through that journey with us.”
That includes making the benefits clear, reducing upfront barriers and helping consumers navigate installation, finance and ongoing participation.
Australia’s rapid uptake of rooftop solar has delivered substantial savings for participating households, but millions of consumers remain unable to install their own systems.
Bazzi said renters, apartment residents and lower-income households risked being locked out of the cheapest renewable energy available across the grid.
“We have the cheapest energy we’ve ever produced sitting in all of our grids,” she said. “But then you have renters, low-income earners, apartment dwellers—they’re locked out of the system, and they’ll remain locked out.”
She pointed to community batteries and Ausgrid’s community power network trial as ways to share benefits across a wider catchment without requiring each household to purchase its own equipment.
“We need to think about the grid in a way from a customer lens—to say, what do customers need, and how do we just facilitate the need?” Bazzi said. “They just automatically get that benefit.”
ESC’s Gerard Brody questioned the longstanding regulatory assumption that consumers will make good decisions when given enough information and product options.
“Ordinary consumers can participate if they want to, without being energy experts,” he said. “More choice, more disclosure, more information is not necessarily in the consumer’s interests.”
Instead, products must be safe, understandable and capable of delivering their promised benefits over time. Brody warned that overpromising could undermine trust, citing the disappointment some solar owners experienced as feed-in tariffs declined from earlier levels.
“The choices must be effective, they must be safe, they must deliver on the promise that’s offered,” he said.
He argued for a stronger focus on “fairness by design”, under which consumer outcomes are built into products from the outset rather than relying on households to continually optimise their arrangements.
The panel identified the loyalty penalty—the higher prices sometimes paid by customers who remain on older energy plans—as a major source of distrust.
Brody said Victorian Essential Services Commission analysis had found that customers who had remained on the same plan for two years or more could save an average of $410 annually by moving to a cheaper plan, increasing to $950 for customers on decade-old contracts.
“It surprises me [that] we’re yet to have an electricity retailer in this country say, ‘We’re going to put all customers on the best offer that we have’,” he said.
Brolan acknowledged that the issue remained difficult for retailers operating in a highly competitive market.
“I’m not going to sit here and say I’ve got the answer to that,” she said. “But we are actively thinking about that, because I would love to see something that is more balanced.”
For McMahon, the challenge was for companies to act before regulators intervened.
“Why wait for intervention before you act?” she asked.
Across the discussion, the central message was clear: consumers should benefit from the transition without having to master its complexity. Putting consumers at the centre of the transition means designing the market around their needs, not expecting them to navigate its complexity.