On 28 April 2015, the Queensland Government announced that it would hold off on implementing part of the NECF known as the "market monitoring regime" in South East Queensland. Please see our previous Alerts on 15 May 2015 and 29 May 2015 for information on the specific impacts of that policy change on manufactured homes parks.
The Queensland Government has now acted upon that announcement and taken the formal step to delay the commencement of retail electricity price deregulation in South East Queensland until 1 July 2016. This was achieved through the Electricity Competition and Protection Legislation Amendment (Postponement) Regulation 2015 and the proclamation of 4 June 2015. That proclamation excludes certain sections of the Electricity Competition and Protection Legislation Amendment Act 2014 from commencing on 1 July this year.
The delay of price deregulation has unintended impacts on the solar feed-in tariff. These impacts are addressed in the National Energy Retail Law (Queensland) (Transitional) Regulation 2015. The transitional regulation preserves the current legislative approach to the solar feed-in tariff by prescribing the retail entities that are required to pay the regulated feed-in tariff to eligible solar customers. Those retail entities are Ergon Energy and Origin Energy (in respect of a small area near Goondiwindi).
Despite the delayed commencement of the electricity price deregulation, from 1 July 2015, park owners will still need to:
- continue to comply with Section 99A of the Manufactured Homes (Residential Parks) Act 2003 (Qld) (MHRP Act); and
- comply with the other requirements of the National Energy Customer Framework to the extent that those requirements are not dealt with by Section 99A of the MHRP Act; and
- register for an applicable on-seller exemption by completing the registration form available at https://www.aer.gov.au, prior to 1 July 2015; and
- familiarise themselves and comply with the Australian Energy Regulator Retail Exempt Selling Guideline April 2015.
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