Has Jemena honoured its commitment to act on your recommendations? Are there any areas where you think your direction hasn’t been followed?

These were some of the key questions we asked of our customers when reviewing the Draft 2025 Plan at our final customer forum, 2 March 2024, for Jemena Gas Network’s 2025-30 Price Review.

Our customers had made several recommendations:

1. Have a renewable gas strategy for supporting customers
2. Provide renewable gas safely and reliably
3. Stronger presence in terms of renewable gas advocacy and communications
4. Providing affordable services by investing in infrastructure necessary for the energy transition and finding a balance between rising cost of living and retaining the customer base
5. Support vulnerable customers to have a choice in gas
6. Take the seven regulatory response options forward into the Draft 2025 Plan.

David Gillespie, Managing Director, Jemena said at Customer Forum eight: “18 months or so back we started engagement with our customer base and that engagement is fundamentally helping us shape the things that are important to put into that submission. ”

“There’s a handful of tricky issues and so we really want to help, I think, customers understand how we’re approaching those issues, so that when we put our submission to the regulator we can say with confidence this isn’t just our approach but it’s also informed by our discussions.”

Jemena customers like Rajat and Kate told us that they felt that the engagement process had been genuine and had allowed for different onions to be incorporated.

“It’s been a long journey, being engaged in this dialogue with Jemena. I wasn’t sure how much Jemena would go to an extent to hear us, you know. I just thought it could potentially just be lip service. It goes to show how serious Jemena has been in this whole journey and I’m really happy about it.” (sic)

Kate told us: “I think Jemena have been really good at trying to listen to a range of different opinions from different people and integrated that into one response that fits everyone in the best way possible.”

They also mentioned the difficulties with the cost of living and the importance of vulnerable customers being looked after as part of the plan.

“Australia as a country has been going through trying times in terms of the economic conditions, people facing challenging times, there’s a vulnerable section which is increasing by the day.” (sic) said Rajat.

The role of renewable gas in the form of biomethane in the future and the investments Jemena was making in this space, was also raised and given support from customers.

Kate said: “I think moving towards biomethane as a renewable gas option will have the most impact on us. When we’re talking about what the price of gas is going to be in 2050, I think that the projects that Jemena is investing in, is where the attention should be put at the moment.”

We believe it was also important to hear from other voices that are not Jemena’s, so the forum also heard from the Human Library consisting of Douglas McCloskey (Public Interest Advocacy Centre), Gavin Dufty (St Vincent De Paul) and Stephen Gray (University of Queensland and Frontier Economics). This group posed particular keep in mind’ questions to help customers grapple with the future uncertainty and complexity and assist with deliberations.

This was the final time that our customers met as a group and we’re now compiling our Plan to submit it to the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) before 30 June 2024.