Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For many businesses in Parramatta and across Western Sydney there is a crisis coming. It is a crisis in power prices, and for some it's already here. One local business told me that they're facing an increase in December, and according to their brokers it will be between 160 and 200 per cent in direct electricity costs. They've already been told by their major multinational customers that they'll not accept the effect of this increase and will move their sourcing offshore, forcing the business to follow them to Asia. I don't want to focus on what went wrong—enough of that is going on out in the ether. But I do want to ask the question: when costs go up like this in a market, why aren't solutions being found locally? That is what usually happens—prices go up and businesses move in. With solar and battery options it looks like there could be business opportunities out there that aren't being exploited. I can already hear my local manufacturers saying that they're not power companies, and they don't have the expertise to go it alone and that's probably quite right. But why isn't somebody else moving in to capitalise on these rising costs and the opportunities to produce power locally at a lower cost?

If you look at the current circumstances in our business parks, you'll find high-energy-use businesses that use so much power that, even if they installed solar panels on every square inch and grid in their garden beds, they couldn't cover their power bills. But next door there is a logistics company that has huge roofs and very low power costs. Why can't they trade? It goes beyond sharing roofs. High energy businesses already smooth out their usage as much as possible to avoid paying the peak usage for the whole month. They bring that peak down by smoothing out their power usage. What if businesses in a power hub smoothed it out between them? What if somebody worked out the combined roof space, the different usage patterns, the most efficient combination and offered those roof owners a deal? What if businesses within the power hub cooperated, within reason, to rearrange some of their peak usage, and where there is no business usage for current patterns they simply moved it. Why isn't someone else forming a symbiotic relationship within the group of businesses and matching businesses with different input capacity, usage patterns and different roof capacities to keep power usage smooth and minimise battery storage requirements? It would help to reduce the power bills of businesses, and those of their customers and suppliers. It's a win right across the board.

It might also be useful, as regulators increase the use of demand management to smooth power usage, if platforms existed across power hubs that predicted power use, how much was in storage and when it would be used. Why isn't it happening? Well, a local expert in Parramatta is making it happen. We've already got enough businesses in a week to go to trial, but we are looking for more. So if you're interested in participating or being kept informed, just send my office an email—no obligation, you won't get spammed: Julie.Owens.mp@aph.gov.au. The answers are out there, and we're going to find them.