Consumer groups join court fight against utility over solar charges

“It will also cause long-term reputational damage to SAPN itself and is likely to accelerate the flight of solar and battery consumers from the grid, creating more of a cost burden for legacy grid-reliant consumers,” the Total Environment Centre says.

According to the TEC’s Mark Byrne, if SAPN succeeds in introducing the charge, then other network operators around the country could follow.

“We consider it likely that if SAPN is successful in its appeal, other networks around Australia will seek to introduce similarly discriminatory tariffs on solar customers, increasing their costs and slowing the introduction of a decentralised and renewable energy-based electricity system,” Byrne said.

“Our role in the case will be to clarify that the electricity rules do not allow networks to discriminate against solar owners under any circumstances.”

The TEC is acting with Solar Citizens, a solar consumer group with some 90,000 members, with funding from Energy Consumers Australia. Its application to join the court action was approved by the court on Monday.

It is one of a number of legal actions and protests over network costs currently taking place in Australia.

In NSW, the state-owned network operators are taking the AER to court over its refusal to accept all their spending plans in the next five years. The Public Interest Advisory Council is joined to that court action, arguing that the AER still allowed too much spending, and unnecessary costs will be passed on to consumers.

Networks around Australia are also under fire for tariff changes that the solar industry argues will discriminate against solar households.

This includes higher fixed charges in many states, including in Queensland where a household consuming just 1MWh of electricity a year will pay an average of 72c/kWh for electricity. That compares to the wholesale price of around 4c/kWh.

Critics say the mark-up – through network charges, retail margins and other margins – is simply not justified and not sustainable. The NSW networks are also considering a form of “solar tax”, imposing network charges on exports from rooftop solar back to the grid.