Submission to the NSW Office of Energy and Climate and NSW Treasury: Protecting NSW customers of embedded networks

PIAC made a submission to the NSW Office of Energy and Climate Change (OECC) and NSW Treasury’s consultation to the Draft Ministerial Statement of Expectations: Protecting NSW customers of embedded networks.

We commend the NSW Government for pursuing reforms that will better protect NSW consumers, including being a leader in proposing strong protections for people receiving hot or chilled water in embedded networks. We also support the NSW Government’s commitment to ensure that future embedded networks are only approved where doing so is demonstrably in the long term interests of consumers.

In this submission we outline the principles which should guide implementation of the NSW Government’s objective to ‘Provide more equitable consumer and price protections for embedded network customers’ and comment on:

• The Draft Statement of Expectations;
• The Embedded Network Action Plan – Improving outcomes for customers of embedded networks; and
• Other recommendations made in Report No. 3/57 of the Committee on Law and Safety– Embedded networks in NSW and the NSW Government’s responses to these recommendations.