AGL recently responded to the Australian Energy Market Commission’s (AEMC) consultation paper on regulating conditional discounting. In this submission, we encourage the AEMC to give consideration to the significant shift in the energy retail market particularly with the introduction of the Competition and Consumer (Industry Code – Electricity Retail) Regulations 2019 (the Electricity Code). The Electricity Code has had profound impacts on the market including:

• restricting conditional discounts from being the headline offer feature, and:
• requiring discounts to be calculated against the reference price.

Since the introduction of this Code on 1 July 2019, both the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) have recently released reports noting a substantial shift in retailer discounting practices, moving away from the conditional discounting practices that prompted the Rule change request with the AEMC.

You can read our full submission here.