Customer-Led Tariffs
Empowering customers by driving smarter, fairer electricity pricing.
Why this matters
Electricity tariffs are becoming more complex as the energy system evolves, making it harder for customers to understand and engage with their energy use and costs.
Customers are telling us they want pricing that is fair, easy to understand and supports them to make informed decisions.
As we move into Stage 3, this work shifts from alignment to testing ensuring future tariff reform is grounded in real customer experience with a strong focus on what ‘fair, clear and manageable’ pricing looks like in practice.
By sequencing customer insight, modelling and feasibility, Stage 3 helps reduce risk, avoid unintended impacts and build confidence across industry, regulators and the community.
Impact
This #BetterTogether initiative is helping to build a shared understanding across industry and consumer groups of what customer-led tariffs could look like, and how they can be designed to deliver better outcomes.
It is also supporting more coordinated, evidence-based engagement with regulatory processes and reforms.
Stage 3 will now translate this into tangible outputs including a Customer Insights Summary, tested pricing concepts through paper trials and exploration of a sandbox pathway.
These insights will directly inform industry decision-making and key regulatory processes (including the AEMC Pricing Review) while ensuring customer protections and trust remain central.
CEO-led leadership
This work is championed by the CEOs of EnergyAustralia, Essential Energy and SA Power Networks, who have come together with a shared commitment to deliver pricing reform that puts customers first. Their leadership has created the space for strategic experimentation, open collaboration, and transparent learning across the sector. It’s a powerful example of the kind of cross-sector cooperation needed to drive genuine transformation.
Our CEOs endorsed key principles to guide this work and future pricing reform:
- Simple – Retail offerings should be easy to understand, explain, and compare. They should reduce complexity for customers.
- Universal – Retail offerings should be available to all residential and small business customers. They should be consistent across networks and include an ‘obligatory offer’ to act as a safeguard.
- Fair and equitable – Retail offerings should be affordable and ensure no one is left behind. One customer’s choice should not negatively affect others.
- Certainty for customers – Retail offerings should be predictable over time, with clear and consistent bill amounts and no surprises.
- Supporting customer choice – Retail offerings should support customer agency and enable meaningful choice.
- Safeguarding customers – Retail offerings should minimise harm, especially for vulnerable customers.
This #BetterTogether initiative is aligned with the Australian Energy Market Commission’s Pricing Review: Electricity Pricing for a Consumer Driven Future. Read our submission from July 2025.
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Collaborative processes like those used by The Energy Charter are crucial because they ensure that the voices of consumer and community are heard and reflected in the decisions shaping their energy future. Through consumers and industry working together, we can create a fairer energy system with innovation that focuses on consumer outcomes that creates benefits for all, including the vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Gavin Dufty, National Director Energy Policy and Research, St Vincent de Paul Society Australia
Collaborators
Customer + Community Outcomes Group
- Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW (EWON)
- Energy Consumers Australia
- Individual lived-experience members from customer councils
- Justice and Equity Centre (formerly Public Interest Advocacy Centre)
- Rheem
- St Vincents de Paul Society Australia.
Industry Collaborators
- EnergyAustralia, led by MD, Mark Collette
- Essential Energy, led by CEO, John Cleland
- SA Power Networks, led by CEO, Andrew Bills.
Resources + additional Information
Stage 1 built a strong foundation for developing future energy tariffs that are customer-focused, support the energy transition, and enable better outcomes for both customers and the energy system.
What happened in Stage 1:
- Deep customer engagement: Over 20 diverse customer voices were involved across three jurisdictions (NSW, VIC, QLD), including vulnerable customers, First Nations people, and small businesses.
- Co-design workshops: These helped unpack how different customer segments view energy pricing and choice.
- Development of design principles: Key principles emerged from this engagement (such as simplicity, fairness, safeguarding vulnerable customers), shaping what “good” looks like in future tariffs.
- Shared understanding: The process helped build a common language between networks, retailers, advocates, and regulators.
Key outcomes:
- Strong support for a customer-first approach to tariff reform.
- Agreement on the need for choice, simplicity, and safeguards.
- Recognition that tariff reform must be grounded in real customer experience and led with empathy.
Building on the insights and design principles shaped in Stage 1, Stage 2 brought the ideas off the page and into action. We worked with independent consultants at Endgame Economics to design and model six innovative network tariff concepts from simple fixed-only options to dynamic peak-dip and aggregate structures.
Using detailed proof-of-concept modelling, these tariff designs were applied to a representative sample of 1,710 customers to understand how they perform in the real world. This hands-on testing allowed us to explore what works, what doesn’t, and what has the potential to transform how customers engage with pricing in a smarter, fairer energy system.
Dr. Ahmad Faruqui, a globally recognised energy economist with over 40 years of experience, shared his expertise during one of the workshops, providing valuable insights into equitable and efficient electrification. His extensive international experience in advising utilities, regulators, and policymakers has been instrumental in shaping discussions. There is work underway for future engagements with Dr. Faruqui to explore network tariff design ideas with The Energy Charter to help shape the future of equitable and efficient electrification.
His recent guest blog, Promoting Electrification Through Technology-Specific Rates, outlines how tailored rate design can support decarbonisation while keeping energy affordable for for customers.
This #BetterTogether initiative aligns with:
Principle 2: We will improve energy affordability and value for customers + communities.
Learn more
Speak to Bec Jolly, Director, Energy Equity, to learn more about the #BetterTogether Customer-Led Tariffs initiative.