Undervoltage has escaped engineering jargon and landed in ordinary kitchens and living rooms.
When a heater underperforms on a cold night, an induction cooktop can only run one hotplate properly, or an EV charger drops out, households do not experience it as a technical footnote. They experience it as a breach of trust. They were encouraged to electrify, and now some appliances are not behaving as promised.
That frustration is real. But the wrong lesson would be that electrification itself is the mistake. What these cases show is that parts of the local grid were built for yesterday’s household, not tomorrow’s.
The old low-voltage network was designed around lighting, conventional appliances and gas-based heating and hot water. A home with reverse-cycle heating, induction cooking, electric hot water, rooftop solar, batteries and EV charging is a different load altogether.
The simplest analogy is a house built for one storey that is now being asked to carry two. You do not respond by saying the second storey is a bad idea. You inspect the structure, identify the weak points and reinforce them where needed.
That is how electrification should be approached in parts of the distribution grid.
Gas is expensive, and that matters. Households are not moving off gas only for climate reasons. They are doing it because it is increasingly hard to justify on cost-of-living grounds.
On the supply side, the ACCC says gas offered by east coast producers to retailers for 2025 supply averaged $13.34 per gigajoule. On the consumer side, ABS data showed gas and other household fuels about 6.4 per cent higher than a year earlier through much of 2025.
The Victorian government says the average existing home could save about $1,900 a year by going all-electric, or about $2,230 a year with existing solar. That is why the answer to expensive gas is not more dependence on gas. It is smarter electrification.
More than 4 million Australian rooftops already carry solar, and household batteries are no longer niche. Australia is now well past 350,000 home battery installations, with uptake surging after the cheaper-home-batteries push from 1 July 2025.
These households are not moving in the wrong direction. They are moving where the energy system is going.
This is not a blackout problem
Undervoltage is not the same as a blackout. Electricity is still being supplied, but the voltage can sag below the level some appliances need to perform properly, especially when several high-power loads switch on at once in the same local area.
That is why the symptoms can look strange: heating output drops, cooktops misbehave, chargers disconnect, and some equipment works at one time of day but not another.
Of course, not every appliance fault is a network problem. A bad installation or a faulty appliance should still be checked. But it would be a mistake to dismiss recurring complaints simply because the issue has been rare in the past.
New load patterns always look unusual before they become common. The real question is not whether every case is caused by undervoltage. The real question is whether enough cases reveal a pattern in the same parts of the network to justify closer scrutiny and targeted fixes.
The real argument is about scale, not direction
The current Victorian debate is partly framed as a contest between networks that want more funding and critics who think the problem is being overstated. There is some truth in that tension. Network businesses do have an incentive to argue for more augmentation, and regulators are right to test those forecasts hard.
But the healthy argument is about scale, pace and evidence. It is not about whether electrification is the wrong direction. If smart-meter data, feeder measurements, electrician reports and customer complaints all point to the same weak pockets of network, then acting early is not wasteful. It is prudent planning.
Even if some forecasts are later revised down, the direction of travel is obvious. As gas heating, hot water, cooking and transport are replaced with electric alternatives, local winter peaks will become more demanding, not less.
The answer is to strengthen weak parts of the grid
The answer is not blanket overbuilding. Nor is it telling households to stay on gas. The answer is to treat undervoltage as a local planning and operations problem.
In some streets, that will mean stronger transformers, targeted conductor upgrades, phase balancing or other local network works. In others, it may mean using advanced metering data and flexible demand to identify and relieve stress earlier.
This is where the engineering has to become practical. Electric hot water can often be shifted. Some EV charging can be scheduled. Homes can sometimes be pre-heated or pre-cooled earlier in the day. Retail signals, smart controls and network planning need to start working together instead of colliding at peak times. The future grid is not just bigger. It is better coordinated.
Regional Victoria should take this seriously, but not fatalistically. Some regional feeders can be more exposed because they are longer and more lightly meshed. Older urban networks can also be vulnerable.
The key point is that this is local. The presence of weak points does not mean the whole transition is flawed. It means the transition is real enough that weak points are starting to show.
There is also a fairness issue here. Households are being encouraged to electrify because it can lower emissions, improve health and cut bills. That pathway cannot be allowed to work smoothly only in suburbs or streets where the local network happens to have spare capacity. Electrification cannot become a privilege of the best-served feeder.
We should treat this the way we treat housing growth
When a city needs more homes, we do not respond by saying “no more second storeys, no more apartments, no more new streets,” because some areas need stronger roads, pipes, or substations. We upgrade the supporting infrastructure so growth can happen safely and fairly. Energy should be no different. If parts of the grid are too weak for the all-electric household, the task is to make those parts fit for purpose.
Australia should not weaponise undervoltage against electrification. It should use it as an early warning. Find the weak points. Measure them honestly. Fix them efficiently. Then keep electrifying.
The old grid was built for a different household. The next grid has to support the all-electric one.
Scott Hamilton is Adjunct Associate Professor with the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at Monash University
Saman A. Gorji is Associate Professor with the School of Engineering at Deakin University
