“Honeymoon over” as another small “solar friendly” retailer succumbs to energy chaos

Australia’s fossil fuel driven energy market crisis has claimed another victim, with retailer Elysian Energy entering voluntary administration and its customers being redistributed to other providers.

The Australian Energy Regulator said late on Thursday that Elysian Energy’s authorisation to trade was being halted effective September 02 2022, after the company was placed in external administration.

This has, in turn, once again triggered the Retailer of Last Resort mechanism, which will automatically transfer the failed retailer’s customers – 5,000 in Victoria and another 2,500 in other NEM states – to the likes of Origin Energy, EnergyAustralia, ActewAGL Retail, and Aurora Energy.

The customer transfer in Victoria will be handled separately by that state’s Essential Services Commission, while in the other NEM states the RoLR role will be undertaken by the AER. Customers are free to change retailers after being reallocated.

Elysian’s main point of difference in Australia’s increasingly less crowded energy retail market was a subscription service model offering, that billed a set monthly fee for a capped amount of energy usage, and then a low rate for anything over that amount.

The company also offered a decent, above market rooftop solar feed-in tariff in most states, and its Solar Savings package won the Gold Mozo Experts Choice Energy Award in the “solar-friendly electricity” category in 2021.

But, as one customer commented on social media, “the honeymoon is over” for Elysian and a growing number of similar smaller retailers who have found themselves ill-equipped to navigate sustained soaring wholesale electricity prices.

“Unfortunately, the wholesale conditions at the moment are very challenging for energy retailers, and we finally had to make hard a decision to reflect this unprecedented increase in our costs,” Elysian said on Facebook in June.

The comment from Elysian was one of many offered up on the social media platform in response to scores of customer complaints that the cost of their monthly power bill had increased more than three-fold, in some cases, for the same usage.

“We are very mindful that price increases are never good news, and we look forward to more normal, lower energy prices in the future,” Elysian said.

Elysian’s failure follows closely on the news, last week, that solar and battery virtual power plant focused retailer Social Energy had gone into administration, joining a handful of others before it.

In June, Australia’s first community-owned energy retailer, Byron Bay-based Enova, went into voluntary administration, blaming a “badly structured” market whose design protects the fossil fuel-backed incumbents.

“When this dies down,” said Enova co-founder and former chairperson Alison Crook at the time, “the government will be left with a market controlled by an oligopoly who are determined to squeeze every last cent out of their gas and coal assets and control renewables as they come in.”