Energy Prices

Dr HARVEY (Newland) (14:28): My question is to the Minister for Energy and Mining. Will the minister update the house on how the government's plans to modernise the electricity grid will help reduce energy prices?

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Minister. The minister will be heard in silence.

The Hon. D.C. VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart—Minister for Energy and Mining) (14:28): I thank another new Liberal member of parliament for focusing on what is incredibly important to his electorate, as others already have. It is another question about what we will do to make electricity more affordable and more reliable for the people in his electorate. Thank you, member for Newland.

There are many things we are doing. Our policy has been very clearly articulated over many months. What the member for Newland is asking about is that part of our policy that we put forward back in October last year, which the previous government completely neglected, and that was with regard to technology improvements and demand-side solutions. The government previously was very keen on owning its own dirty diesel generators. The government was very keen on the 'go it alone, put up the barriers, put up the walls, don't talk to any state, don't help them, don't get any help from them' approach. Our approach is very different and our approach will work.

We are very focused on delivering improvements not only on the supply side but on the demand side. On the supply side, we have $10 million dedicated towards technology improvement trials for supply integration. One of the great faults of the previous government was that they just thought, 'There's some generation and there's some generation and there's some generation, and they all add up to a lot of generation, so I guess that will be good.' Guess what? It wasn't good. It gave us a state with more expensive and less reliable electricity.

What we are going to do is integrate all those types of supply and new supply which is coming on stream as well. We are going to integrate it with partners, with industry, with academics, with a wide range of expert partners to inform us about the best way to integrate supply so that all those different generators can work productively together so that they can be there to deliver electricity to the people of South Australia when they need it.

We also have $20 million set aside to look on the demand side. I said before that this is something that the previous government just did not ever consider. We are going to put $10 million towards demand aggregation technology improvements. That's very much about companies voluntarily having the opportunity to bundle up their demand to do deals in bulk, essentially, with suppliers, which are to the advantage of both the suppliers and, more importantly, the consumers.

That might be a minigrid of households, it might be a group of companies getting together, it might well be as simple as a group saying, 'Our peak demand is at this time. It wouldn't hurt us at all if we shifted our peak demand to another time at which an electricity supplier could deliver cheaper electricity at that point in time.' So everybody is a winner. Of course, it could be much more complicated than that, and that's why, again, we will engage with expert partners to help us develop these models, which will then be available to be rolled out to consumers.

There is another $10 million specifically to demand management trials so that individual consumers, whether they be small, whether they be big, can access the technology and other opportunities that are available now but are emerging and improving and becoming more and more available so that individual consumers can actually manage their own demand to their own advantage.

What is so important about all of this is that when we get this right with the advice of our partners it will not only support those organisations that aggregate the demand, or those individual suppliers which manage their demand better it will support all electricity consumers across the state because by taking some of the peak off the highest demand times for electricity, all other consumers will benefit from lower prices as well.