{"id":89298,"date":"2025-02-04T05:07:54","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T19:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=89298"},"modified":"2025-02-04T07:46:52","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T22:16:52","slug":"bowen-electricity-dmo-mb3109","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/bowen-electricity-dmo-mb3109\/","title":{"rendered":"Bowen Pledges Not To Meddle With Power Price News"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Electricity<\/p>\n

Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen has said that unlike the previous Morrison Government in the lead-up to the last election, he won’t be interfering with the timing of electricity Default Market Offer (DMO) announcements for 2025\/26. <\/p>\n

The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) sets Default Market Offer electricity prices for small business and residential customers for the following financial year in New South Wales, South Australia and South-East Queensland.\u00a0 The DMO is designed to be a safety net of sorts, ensuring electricity customers who don’t choose a market offer (the vast majority do) aren’t gouged by retailers (too much).<\/p>\n

While a minority of customers are on Default Market Offers, the DMO basically sets the scene for market offers. The DMO price for each region also acts as a reference price that electricity retailers must show as a comparison to their market offers.<\/p>\n

The AER usually releases its final determination for the following financial year on May 1. But back in 2022, an election year, it didn’t. The Regulator was given more time by the then-Morrison Government.<\/p>\n

This effectively set a trap for Labor (which should have known better) and its pledge to cut annual household electricity bills by $275 by 2025. Meanwhile, the Coalition was crowing household electricity prices in the National Electricity Market (NEM) had fallen significantly over the previous two financial years.<\/p>\n

“We are now turning the corner on power prices,” stated a page (archived, 21 May 2022)<\/a> on the Liberal website1<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The 2022 Australian Federal election was held on Saturday 21 May. The AER didn\u2019t release its final determination until May 26, 5 days later. And in it was bad news – residential price rises of between 7.2% and 18.3% in nominal terms depending on the region. This was much higher than what was in the draft decision released in February that year (-2.4% – +5.8%). While DMO 4 prices for small business customers were not directly comparable with DMO 3 prices due to a new usage benchmark, the increases were in the range of 5.7% and 19.7%.<\/p>\n

The reasons given<\/a>:<\/p>\n