The South Australian Government is currently reviewing its licensing requirements under the Electricity Act 1996 for electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and system control functions in light of the evolving electricity market.

AGL made a formal submission to the review, a copy of which is available here.

With the accelerating uptake in distributed energy resources and the scaling of innovative energy service business models, such as orchestration, demand response and power purchase agreements, it is crucial that South Australia’s regulatory framework facilitates customers’ ability to participate in flexible demand and generation.

The established national framework for generator and load registration, and retailer authorisation, also provides an opportunity to streamline jurisdictional licensing requirements where they are duplicative with these national arrangements and therefore do not result in benefits to consumers, but in fact may add unnecessary costs.

AGL recommends the SA Government:

1. Remove the generation licensing requirement in the Electricity Act 1996 for all generators to streamline jurisdictional requirements and reduce duplication with the national regulatory framework, improve efficiency and better support innovative energy services.
2. Regulate all residual technical and safety requirements currently provided for under the SA electricity licensing framework through stand-alone technical regulations, to be administered by the SA Technical Regulator.
3. In the context of state licensing requirements that will continue to operate for use cases not contemplated by the national framework (for example EV charging stations), we would encourage the Department to undertake a cost benefit analysis to ensure any applicable license conditions are fit-for-purpose and calibrated to specific categories of operation.