Pierce, who spoke at the AEMC's Australian Energy Week conference in Melbourne earlier this year, called on leaders to ensure the regulatory framework facilitated competitive and efficient energy markets in a time of technological change.
A revolution is happening in renewables, storage, information management, and in the increasingly multidirectional nature of the flow of energy, Pierce said.
And the rise of energy technologies is enabling devolution of decision making, providing consumers with options and choices that are driving the transformation of the energy sector.
“More than 1.5 million households in Australia now have rooftop solar,” Pierce said.
“Combine this with the possibilities of battery storage and Australians have the opportunity to produce and consume their own power like never before.
“At the same time, addressing the intermittency of renewable generation is one of the drivers behind storage facilities participating in the wholesale market.
“This is an exciting development as we seek to successfully transform the electricity sector to result in a less carbon intensive future.”
Pierce noted that the AEMC was supporting the COAG Energy Council’s development of a policy and regulatory framework that sustained consumer choice and technological transformation. This framework, he said, would be technology agnostic.
"The Commission does not pick winners - – we spend a great deal of time thinking about how to design a framework that is technologically neutral – one that can equally accommodate existing technologies, and those not yet in existence, as well as environmental requirements determined by government," he said.
"The maturing market framework is designed to put consumers first."
From July 1 next year, networks will have to structure their prices to reflect the consumption choices of individual consumers, and households will be able to see the dollar value of their consumption choices.
To allow consumers to respond to price signals, new rules were made on November 2014 to make it easier for consumers to obtain simple, affordable and timely information from networks and retailers about the electricity they are using.
Finally, the AEMC’s new rules on metering reform remove the networks’ effective metering monopoly and enable the competitive provision of advanced meters for households and small business, giving consumers more opportunities to access a wider range of energy services.
“Our country’s regulatory model draws a distinction between the operating space that can be given over to competition and the space given to monopoly functions of the networks which should remain subject to an incentive-based regulatory regime,” Pierce said.
“The stakes are high in getting the right line between what is competitive and what should be regulated.
“Competition transfers risk from consumers to business when competing businesses bear the responsibility for their own good or bad investment decisions, and bear the responsibility for subsequent success or failure of their business models.”
“It is only where competition cannot deliver consumer benefits that economic regulation should be contemplated,” Pierce concluded.
