Goyder South wind farm. Photo: Neoen Australia.
Australia consumers who offset all or part of their power bill with renewables should expect their premiums to plunge this year, as prices for the green certificates backing green power collapse.
A survey of 15 offers in the market shows that electricity retailers are marking up GreenPower, a national renewable electricity scheme, by between 330 per cent and 840 per cent when compared to what Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs) are trading for this week in spot markets.
LGCs guarantee that a megawatt hour of energy is renewable, but prices for these have collapsed over the last 12 months to just $7 — a figure that works out to 0.7 cents per kilowatt hour (c/kWh).
It’s led several retailers to promise a price reset in June, but they will still pocket the premium they are charging in the interim, and that has left some consumer energy experts aghast.
“The premiums that are currently being charged for GreenPower by the big energy retailers out there are nothing more than a price gouging rip off,” says Ty Christopher, the director of University of Wollongong’s Energy Futures Network.
“It is not unreasonable to expect that GreenPower payments will have a premium over [regular] LGCs because they’re auditable, real, guaranteed to be green power. Whether that premium should be 840 per cent is the question.”
Energy Consumers Australia general manager of advocacy and policy Brian Spak says the premiums for GreenPower do not represent fair value when compared to the cost of certificates today – although he says other costs such as participating in the scheme and when and where LGCs are bought need to be taken into account.
“You would expect that as these LGC prices drop the premium would drop as well, but we did a little bit of looking into this [in a report in 2022] and it’s got prices between 4.2c/kWh in Victoria to 5c/kWh in South Australia, when at the time LGCs were trading at about $45,” he told Renew Economy.
“If you look now, some of those prices seem to be about the same.”
Australians who buy GreenPower voluntarily pay a bit more for guaranteeing some or all of their electricity comes from renewables, but instead of getting a direct injection of wind or solar, retailers buy and retire LGCs that match the energy use.
When the GreenPower scheme started in 2017, LGC prices hovered above $80 then halved to $30-50 in the years to 2024. At the start of 2025 they were trading on spot markets just above $32, before landing at less than a quarter of that this week.
Many offers haven’t moved much in the last few years, but some have and at least five retailers who responded to Renew Economy queries say they will likely be looking at the program in the middle of the year.
Fifteen current retail offers surveyed by Renew Economy are priced at between 3c/kWh and 6.6c/kWh, compared to the 0.7c/kWh LGCs are going for in spot markets this week.
| Retailer | 100% GreenPower (c/kWh) |
| LGC spot price 12 January 2026 | 0.7 |
| Amber | 3 |
| Red Energy (owned by Snowy Hydro) | 3.3 |
| Synergy | 3.4 |
| AGL | 4.4 |
| ZEN Energy | 4.4 |
| Origin Energy | 4.5 |
| Momentum Energy (owned by Hydro Tasmania) | 4.95 |
| Discovery Energy | 4.95 |
| EnergyAustralia | 4.95 |
| Powershop (owned by Shell) | 5.5 |
| Diamond Energy | 5.5 |
| CovaU (owned by TPC Consolidated) | 5.5 |
| OVO Energy (owned by AGL) | 5.5 |
| Rimfire Energy | 6 |
| ActewAGL (owned by AGL and the ACT government) | 6.6 |
* Other companies including Nectr, Engie and Ergon offer GreenPower products but don’t list a cents per kilowatt hour price, while others such as Flow Power which are listed on the GreenPower provider site only offer renewable energy. EnergyLocals say they no longer offer GreenPower products because they’ve divested the retail arm.
There is little transparency about just how much the program costs retailers.
Consumers must take on trust that the premium they’re paying may be because an LGC was bought two years ago under a forward contract at $45 or more – and not because their retailer is pocketing a big difference by buying yesterday at $7 on the spot market.
GreenPower prices are set by retailers and aren’t regulated or monitored by the auditing body GreenPower, which is run out of the New South Wales government, or the Australian Energy Regulator.
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) keeps tabs on energy bills, but GreenPower is not a major element – the 2025 report into energy prices only mentioned the term twice in the glossary and had one other reference to a green component in bills.
Spak says given how complex energy offers already are, it’s a big ask for consumers to also judge whether their GreenPower cost is reasonable.
Amber Electric charges the lowest markup for GreenPower of the 15 offers Renew Economy surveyed at 3c/kWh, and co-founder Chris Thompson says their default case is to reset in June when they buy LGCs.
“The prices vary over different time horizons so we do engage in a level of forward hedging, so especially if prices go up we can protect people,” he tells Renew Economy.
“We pre-bought in June at a higher price for most of our volume,
“The bottom of the market has fallen in a way we didn’t expect [then], when certificates were trading at $25. We’ll talk to our pricing team and see about doing a mid-year adjustment.”
But like Christopher, he also says it’s valid that consumers pay a small premium for GreenPower-related LGCs to account for GST, a very small administrative cost, and the fact that not all LGCs can be used in the scheme – most hydro and any generated before 2017 are ineligible.
Lachie Richards, general manager of renewables-first retailer Diamond Energy, justifies their big markup by saying spot prices don’t reflect the full cost of suppling accredited GreenPower over time.
Diamond Energy charges 5.5c/kWh for its GreenPower offer.
“Diamond Energy’s residential GreenPower rate has remained unchanged for many years, including periods when LGC prices were well above this GreenPower rate,” he said in a statement supplied to Renew Economy.
“The rate is reviewed in line with annual regulatory price resets, and reflects long-term procurement, certification and risk management.”
Origin Energy, which charges 4.4c/kWh, says it will review the GreenPower tariff at the same time as it looks at its Default Market Offer (DMO) and Victorian Default Offer (VDO) around June.
“This includes our GreenPower prices, which will be reviewed and updated later this year, considering a range of internal and external factors,” an Origin spokesperson told Renew Economy.
A Red Energy spokesperson says they’ve been lowering GreenPower prices over the years, from 5.83c/kWh in 2022 to the current 3.3c/kWh.
“Assuming the market price of LGCs continues to reduce over time, we will continue to adjust our pricing to ensure we continue to offer value,” they told Renew Economy.
A Shell spokesperson says pricing reflects hedging costs over time, GST and administration.
There is a real question, however, as to whether paying a premium for renewable energy is still necessary.
Over the last three months renewables made up 50.7 per cent of the Western Australian market and 49.9 per cent of the National Electricity Market (NEM), Rystad data shows. Those figures are only a few percentage points lower for the whole year.
“GreenPower was a valuable aspect of the market probably even five years ago but investigating this today, I saw one retailer that offers a product to pay a premium to make sure 50 per cent of your power is renewable,” Spak says.
“But across the NEM 49.9 per cent of power is already renewable.”
“Hopefully in just another five or six years we’ll be about 75 per cent, so there’s an open question as to whether consumers understand what they’re actually buying and the impact it’s having.”
The idea behind GreenPower was originally as part of a market-based toolkit to encourage the purchase of LGCs, which would then drive renewable energy development.
But today the healthy state of renewable energy means there’s now a surplus of LGCs in the market which is driving prices down.
Spak says it means the impact of buying GreenPower as a consumer, to drive energy investment, is now less obvious especially given other schemes such as the Capacity Investment Scheme and state mandates are the new setters of price signals.
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