Explainer: Who will set Australia’s rules for home energy devices such as solar, plug-in batteries and EVs?

Australia’s national regime for consumer energy technology announced on Friday September 11 separates writing, approving and enforcing standards. Understanding that division will be important when batteries, electric cars, plug-in solar and other devices do not perform as intended.

Ministers agreed to new arrangements for national technical regulation, which have been under debate since 2019.

At the center will be a new National Consumer Energy Resources (CER) Technical Code which will define the capabilities required of regulated products and identify the specifications or standards accepted as satisfying those requirements. Products will need certification before entering the regulated market.

Who will do what?

Four Commonwealth actors will share responsibility.

The Technical Requirements Office, or TRO, will sit inside the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. It will develop and maintain the Code, commission development of requirements and solutions from Standards Australia and prepare a two-year Forward Work Plan setting priorities for new and revised requirements.

The Technical Requirements Advisory Committee, or TRAC, will advise the TRO and the Energy Minister. It is described as independent but will be non-statutory and established by the department. Its seven members will be appointed for three-year terms by the chair of the intergovernmental Electricity Working Group after a ‘merit process’ and consultation with states and territories.

The Commonwealth Energy Minister, or a delegate, will approve changes to both the Code and the Forward Work Plan. TRAC will have a formal advisory path to the Minister, but the document does not say its advice will bind the decision-maker.

The Consumer Energy National Technical Regulator, or CENTR, will be a new function of the Clean Energy Regulator. It will certify products, maintain the regulated product list, register suppliers, accredit installers, collect installation information, monitor compliance and take enforcement action. It may advise on whether the rules work in practice, but will not determine their technical requirements.

In short, the department will develop the rules, the minister or delegate will approve them, and CENTR will administer and enforce them.

States and territories will retain existing responsibilities such as electrical safety, consumer protection and requirements for connections to electricity networks (known as the service and installation rules). They will also be able to impose requirements above the national baseline. 

How the Code changes

Both the Code and Forward Work Plan are intended to be updated every two years. And out-of-cycle Code amendments are permitted in response to “emerging issues.”

The legal form of the Code has not yet been specified. If it is made as a legislative instrument, the Legislation Act 2003 would ordinarily bring requirements concerning registration, consultation and parliamentary tabling and, unless an exemption applies, disallowance and eventual sunsetting. A different legal form could attract different safeguards.

The TRO will administer the development of requirements and solutions, potentially drawing on Standards Australia standards, international standards, technical specifications and specially commissioned work. While the TRAC will assess whether proposed solutions satisfy the requirements, and the Minister or delegate will make the final decision, 

The proposed arrangements do not yet spell out what would trigger an urgent review, how quickly the TRO or Minister must respond, or whether CENTR could require reconsideration after identifying a recurring problem through certification, complaints or enforcement.

How unusual is this?

Ministerial approval of a detailed technical instrument is not unprecedented. Under the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme, the responsible minister makes methodology determinations setting the rules for measuring and crediting emissions reductions. The minister must receive advice from the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, or ERAC, and be satisfied that a method complies with legislated offsets-integrity standards. 

However, there are legal and institutional differences. ERAC is an independent statutory committee, while TRAC will be a non-statutory advisory body. Under the carbon-credit legislation, the minister cannot make or vary a method if ERAC advises that it would not comply with one or more of the legislated offsets integrity standards. No equivalent statutory constraint is identified for TRAC advice under the proposed CER arrangements.

A factual question for the forthcoming CER legislation is whether it will add statutory criteria, publication duties or limits on the power to depart from expert advice comparable to those operating in the ACCU scheme.

A further caution is needed about the ACCU comparison. The 2022 Chubb review recommended replacing ERAC with a Carbon Abatement Integrity Committee and proposed that the minister should make or vary methods only with that committee’s endorsement.

The Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026 has been introduced to Parliament, but the CAIC model is not yet law. However, an equivalent model has not been proposed for ministerial decisions on the CER Technical Code.

If a rule fails

Suppose a certified battery repeatedly fails to respond to a required signal from a distribution network after a firmware update. CENTR could detect the pattern through product records, installation data, complaints or enforcement work. If a supplier had breached its obligations, the regulator could investigate and require corrective action.

But if the problem arose because the Code was incomplete, ambiguous or technically mistaken, CENTR could identify the problem and recommend an improvement to the TRO, but it could not itself change the rule. The TRO would develop an amendment, TRAC would advise and the Minister or delegate would decide whether to approve it. 

Responsibility would run through a chain. CENTR would answer for administration and enforcement, the TRO for maintaining an accurate Code, TRAC for its technical advice, and, crucially, the Minister or delegate for the final decision. However, the proposal does not yet specify how disagreements along the chain would be escalated or resolved.

The type of review available will depend on the decision being challenged. If the Code is a legislative instrument, it will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and judicial review for legal validity, but not merits review of its technical content.

Different rules may apply to individual decisions about product registration, certification, suspension or market access. The legislation should make clear which of those decisions can be reviewed. Complaints about the administrative practices of the TRO or CENTR could go to the Commonwealth Ombudsman, but the Ombudsman does not ordinarily replace an agency’s decision with a preferred decision on the merits.

The British comparison

Britain has organised its energy codes (rules and standards) differently. The British government still sets policy and the Energy Secretary has a role in determining standard licence conditions for code (technical standards and rule) managers. Ofgem, the independent regulator, selects and licenses separate code managers responsible for updating and administering industry codes and oversees their work. The British minister is not intended to make decisions on the code changes themselves.

What remains unknown?

A number of consequential questions remain:

– What legal form will the Code take, and how will external standards be incorporated and updated?

– How will Standards Australia’s technical development role be commissioned and governed?

– Will Greenhouse and Energy Minimum Standards (GEMS) be bought into the scope of the Code?

– What criteria must the Minister or delegate apply, and must reasons be published when departing from TRAC advice?

– Can CENTR trigger a Code review, and what response periods will apply to urgent technical problems?

– What legal status will the ‘least cost’ principle have? The framework defines it as minimising regulatory burden for industry, but does not explain how that will be balanced against costs and risks borne by consumers, networks and the electricity system.

– How this framework will interact with distribution network connection requirements, for example to ensure national consistency of flexible exports?

– When will legislation be introduced and the new obligations commence?

Those answers will determine not only how Australia writes national requirements for consumer energy technology, but how quickly it can correct them when experience shows that a standard is not working.

Institutional arrangements for national CER technical regulation. Solid arrows show the approval pathway; dashed arrows show the feedback loop from enforcement back to rule-making, for which the document does not yet specify triggers or timeframes.

Penelope Crossley is a professor of Energy Law at the University of Sydney.

Dr Gabrielle Kuiper works internationally and in Australia on policy and regulation to support DER, including with CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and Integrate to Zero (I2Z), a global NGO focused on accelerating the uptake of DER and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs). You can find her work portfolio at www.gabriellekuiper.xyz