ISP Consumer Panel in their own words: March 2025

The 2026 ISP Consumer Panel members (Mark Henley – Chair, Jarra Hicks, Beverley Hughson and Craig Memery) share an update on their recent contributions to the two-year development of the 2026 ISP.

^{2026 ISP Consumer Panel members Craig Memery, Beverley Hughson, Jarra Hicks and Mark Henley.}

It would be no surprise that the main focus of the 2026 ISP Consumer Panel over recent months has been diving into and responding to the Draft 2025 Inputs, Assumptions and Scenarios Report (IASR) which, in many ways, is the ‘engine’ of the ISP.

A starting point for us has been data from Figure 2 of the 2024 ISP.

The following data, derived by the Panel from Figure 2 above, highlights consumer-driven capacity.

^{Created by the ISP Consumer Panel as highlighted in their IASR submission.}

This data is clear that consumer energy resources (CER), particularly as rooftop solar and coordinated CER storage, are major contributors for increasing capacity (NEM wide) from now through to 2050. In short, CER really matters and is becoming ever more important. So, CER and distributed energy resources (DER) have also been a focus as we have worked through the IASR documents.

We were able to seize an opportunity to call a small gathering of people involved with community energy interests from Melbourne and surrounding districts to help us develop our IASR submission.

It was recognised in this discussion that mid-scale (100kw-30MW range) generation (solar, micro hydro and wind) and storage (‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ batteries) is an area that has often been overlooked in Australian energy system policy and planning. However, with the increased focus on distribution networks, there was strong encouragement for an explicit effort to be made to understand and include the assessment of the contribution that projects at this mid-scale can make to the future electricity system.

Some opportunities uniquely presented by mid-scale projects were discussed and set out as:

• more ability to directly involve and benefit consumers as participants, co-investors, or co-owners of the generation and storage
• there is evidence of community-based energy CER and DER projects contributing to social licence for the energy transition at large due to increasing peoples’ understanding of, benefit from and sense of agency in the transition
• there are potential distribution network benefits of mid-scale generation and storage being owned and operated by third parties (not DNSPs)
• mid-scale projects are potentially much easier to coordinate than an equivalent MWs of CER
• co-benefits in terms of grid services and benefit to communities and consumers if mid-scale generation and storage are co-located and ideally also service some behind the meter load as well
• these projects are quick and nimble compared with large solar farms and so can more easily respond to consumer and network needs.

This year, the Draft 2025 IASR was released in two stages. The Panel is currently developing our response to the Stage 2 paper with a focus on electrification, gas and fuel switching.

In our submission in response to Stage 1 we focused on five themes that we summarised as:

1. Carbon budgets. These are at least as important as the net zero by 2050 target yet it tends to be the 2050 target that is most discussed in public settings.
2. Purposeful policy is paramount. Clear, stable and coordinated policies are required to achieve the transition as effectively as possible.
3. Trust before tech. Communities are as important as individual customers, with their support for major energy projects crucial and the associated ‘social licence’ essential for successful implementation of ISP projects. Trust lays the foundation for social licence.
4. People are investing themselves. CER and DER more generally are crucial to achieving the energy transition which is why much of this submission is presented through a CER/DER prism.
5. Forecasting is fraught. There are many challenges in forecasting such a long way out in such uncertain times.

Key recommendations included:

1. Scenarios: where we proposed naming the ‘progressive’ change to ‘slow’ change and preferred the Green Energy Industries option of the two Green Energy scenarios while continuing to state that we do not consider either Green Energy scenario to be likely.
2. Demand forecasts: behavioural science needs to be considered as a means to model CER and coordination uptake, alongside economic modelling, to incorporate the influence of values and diverse motivations of consumer behaviour.
3. Coordination forecasts: This is ongoing work and an area where we suggested that ‘sensitivity’ analysis needs to be a priority.
4. Financial parameters: Consider varying both the technology-specific weighted average cost of capital and the single discount rate in line with the different scenario narratives.

The Panel meets regularly with AEMO and an ongoing focus is about how to continually improve both consumer input and consumer perspectives into the ISP. One recent focus has been on the development of an ISP capacity-building toolkit which we think is a useful gateway into the ISP.