Carr goes via the backdoor on electricity privatisation

Executives at various energy companies and investment banks must have had a cheerful Christmas. After years of manoeuvring and dead-end options, the NSW electricity industry was finally gift-wrapped and placed under the tree - although it will sit there for another few months yet.

The December Energy Directions Green Paper was typically short on detail. A few things, however, are clear. Prices for domestic users will rise, NSW is unlikely to avoid more coal-fired generation and households may soon be billed by a private sector retailer.

While “committed to retaining the electricity assets it currently owns”, the NSW Government wants out. Treasury has been biding its time since the Pacific Power and Integral financial catastrophes of the 1990s. The need for new capacity provides the impetus for change.

The Green Paper lays the ground work for back-door privatisation. What is delivered in the follow-up White Paper will depend on the deals done with NSW Labor and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

New power stations will be built with private equity. While this is positive, the key to the reform package will be the retail sector.

Electricity has four industry segments: generation, which converts heat into electrons, high-voltage transmission, distribution and retail.

While rarely publicised, government corporations like Energy Australia in NSW and Energex in Queensland combine the very different businesses of distribution and retail.

Distribution involves a network of poles, wires and sub-stations for transporting electricity from power stations to your home. It is engineering based, a crucial part of the supply system and regulated.

The other company buys energy wholesale and then retails it like Harvey Norman does TVs and whitegoods. This business has very few physical assets other than buildings and hi-tech billing and trading systems. As the wholesale “pool” price set by generators can soar from an average of $35 per unit to $10,000 in, literally, five minutes, the core skill of a retailer is risk management using sophisticated contracts and financial derivatives.

The unison of distribution and retail reflects a pragmatic policy decision at the start of the market. Newly-created retailers - they weren’t needed when customers had no choice but government tariffs - didn’t have sufficient collateral to cover their potential pool exposures. Asset backing from generators presented a far better operational and cultural fit - being the other side of the wholesale transaction - but would have stifled competition.

The market has since matured. Having seen the ACCC fail to stop AGL - one of the country’s largest retailers - acquiring a share in a major Victorian generator, the NSW Government is set to make market expectations a reality by formalising vertical integration.

According to the Green Paper, the Government hopes to couple a proportion of retail customers with its generation plant under the same corporate structure. The ACCC will be placated by having new generation and the remaining retail controlled by competing private sector parties.

This may entail existing government retailers continuing to bill customers, with behind-the-scenes wholesaling done by the likes of AGL and Origin. A more radical option would be to sell the whole shebang - billing, marketing and contract management. Bob Carr could rightly argue this isn’t privatisation, as no crucial supply assets would be lost to public ownership and retail is essentially “white-collar”.

The other important variable in the retail solution is “safety net” tariffs for households.

State governments won’t relinquish control of retail price fixing - it has been the major sticking point in the transition to national regulation.

NSW and Queensland face two key difficulties with regulated tariffs for franchised small users like you and me. First, they are generally below cost. Both governments have been slowly ramping prices up in the hope that customers will jump into the market and negotiate commercial terms - if and when they are allowed to.

The second problem is cultural. Unlike Victoria, which had no alternative to radical reform because of its previous budget situation, much of the NSW and Queensland public still see electricity as an essential service necessitating direct government involvement. Even where regulated prices exceed market, people will remain on tariff because their prices are set by someone they can trust - or at least, mistrust less.

A possible solution for Premier Carr would be to staple the rights to serve remaining franchise customers to any sale of existing retail activities. That is, a swag of NSW customers could be handed over to a private retailer, on the proviso that they continue to receive electricity at an agreed price for a certain period.

By facilitating long-awaited consolidation of retail, NSW will cause a major policy headache for Peter Beattie.

His two government-owned retailers don’t have the scale to compete with aggressive private operators with customers stretching from Tweed Heads to Port Lincoln. Energex and Ergon must pose the question: do we grow to match AGL and Origin, retreat to “boutique” retailer status or wither on the vine?

There is precious little time left for half-measures. If its electricity retailers and generators are disallowed - by the owners or NSW government - from participating in the upcoming NSW opportunities, Queensland will be left with an uncommercial industry structure that will only place further pressure on policies such as continued tariff support and public ownership.

Many have been waiting for Bob Carr to let go of the NSW electricity industry so a truly national market can develop in terms of both commercial reach and regulatory consistency. The Energy White Paper due out in April promises a big step in the right direction.