Thursday, 5 February 2026

 David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (10:07): Many in the chamber will not have seen the Augmentation: Customer-Driven Electrification CitiPower submission to the Australian Energy Regulator, but they should and I am going to quote from it because it is a salutary lesson for the state government and its botched processes around energy. They looked at their customers – they have very good smart meter material; they actually checked that the same people remained after electrification. They say:

In addition to the above network-wide analysis, we have identified the difference in the load profiles for a sample of 531 customers who have electrified their households, both pre and post-electrification … we have also confirmed that they are the same customer.

Specifically … on cold days these customers consumed more than four times as much electricity in the morning and evening windows after they had electrified. This is a staggering increase in consumption.

Further, Figure 3 below shows that their average monthly consumption has more than doubled in each month after electrification. Growth in load consumption is particularly pronounced during winter, increasing by over 250 per cent after electrification.

According to CitiPower, this is going to require massive upgrades to the electricity network. Huge costs are going to be loaded onto the community. Nobody is calculating these massive costs into the proposed or forced electrification that is occurring now. Now we know the cat is out of the bag: massive costs after gas is removed.