Australian Energy Regulator Public Forum - C4GS presentation

Australian Energy Regulator

Victoria Electricity Distribution Price Reset (2026-31) - Public forum

AusNet Services, Jemena Electricity Networks, CitiPower, Powercor, United Energy

Consumer Challenge Panel, Powercor consumer, Linda Nieuwenhuizen

Tuesday 1 April 2025

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Good morning

I am Lindy Nieuwenhuizen, CEO of the Committee for Greater Shepparton. Our member funded, apolitical organization brings together almost 120 businesses, government agencies, and community organisations from across the areas of Greater Shepparton, Campaspe and Moira – so that includes towns like Shepparton, Tatura, Echuca, Cobram and Yarrawonga, all within Powercor’s network area.

Greater Shepparton is the biggest city on Victoria’s biggest river. We are one of the most culturally diverse communities in Victoria if not Australia.

We are the home of Victoria’s first and oldest mosque, Australia’s youngest Socceroo and the largest first nations community outside Melbourne.

For our members and especially our manufacturing members, energy reliability is critical to their future, and this means it is also critical to jobs and communities across northern Victoria.

The three LGAs are home to 10% of Victoria’s commercial and industrial energy users and industrial electricity use has increased by a third over the past decade.

Our Achilles' heel is the reliability of our energy supply – and the undeniable fact that our region’s network is thin, vulnerable, and is not keeping up with the scale and speed of investment expected by regional manufacturers and our communities.

Since our Members’ Manufacturing Forum began, energy has been the primary topic of discussion at our monthly meetings.

I have members who experience micro flicks at a rate that equates to one day in three –a 1 second flick in a modern manufacturing plant means around 7 hours of outage, and when you are processing highly perishable products like fruit, meat and milk, this jeopardises product quality. Processors are forced to dispose of the product or process it into lower value products.

One of our largest employers is a commercial laundry that provides linen to hospitals across Victoria. You can’t care for a patient if you can’t put them into a bed with clean sheets. Power outages in their business mean additional costs to extend shifts to make up for disruptions and ensure supply to hospitals. In worst cases it could lead to shortages of clean hospital linen that would impact healthcare.

Our members’ data shows a strong correlation between increased disruptions and summer storm activity – this coincides with the peak harvest periods for fruit and tomatoes - and storm activity is expected to increase under climate change scenarios.

We are also a region that has significant uptake in residential and large-scale renewables – we have more solar energy than our thin, out of date grid can accept at a time when our local industrial use has increased by a third.

Our energy needs in every one of these industries are changing as businesses automate, electrify and as manufacturers consolidate their operations to our region to achieve the scale required for automation and new technology and take advantage of our proximity to all major domestic consumer markets and exports ports.

I want to take you inside a modern fruit packing shed. The days of staff in hair nets standing over conveyor belts relying on the human eye to spot blemished fruit or tomatoes are gone. Today, more than 90 photos are taken of the inside and outside of each piece of fruit in only seconds as it enters the facility – and one of the final steps is a robot that delicately rotates each piece of fruit in the box to ensure its best profile is facing the consumer.

We have robots milking our cows and delivering feed rations that are precisely calibrated to the health needs of each animal.

Beyond the farms and orchards, Greater Shepparton is one of Australia’s most strategically important food, fibre, and freight hubs.

We are home to iconic brands and businesses including SPC, Milk Lab, White King, Unilever, Bega Cheese, Devondale, Western Star, Fonterra, Saputo, Visy, Opal, Civilmart, GrainCorp and Furphy.

Our local manufacturers

• contribute $5.5 billion to the Australian economy,

• employ more than 6000 local people and

• inject more than half a billion dollars of wages and salaries into our local economy each year.

Our food processors are supported and complimented by a wide mix of other construction, value adding, engineering and manufacturing.

• We are Australia’s fourth largest manufacturer of metal containers, things like silos, vats and tanks,

• We are home to one of Australia’s 10 robotic steel beam assembly robots and

• Our water engineering technology is improving water management around the globe.

These businesses have already made significant investments in automation, robots, co-bots and technology driven efficiencies – and they have plans for much more.

This is what we need our grid to support our industry,  in more locations and at greater levels than ever before.

We also need a grid that can support electrification.

Cheap reliable gas has underpinned Victoria’s manufacturing dominance and that’s true in our region where we represent 8% of all of Victoria’s industrial gas use, but unlike the rest of Victoria where most gas is used by residential and business, in our region 70% of our gas is used by 32 sites located in seven discrete clusters.

Some do not have electrification solutions yet – but for the majority, it is the grid’s performance and our lack of confidence in its performance that is preventing and delaying electrification in advance of the looming domestic gas shortfalls.

Victoria’s energy grid performance is not homogenous, and it has created a very tilted playing field.

We need smarter tariff design, targeted network investment and continuing dialogue and partnerships with Powercor to release the grid’s handbrake on our economic growth, and importantly to retain and grow the opportunities and jobs for people in communities across our region.

That is why we believe Powercor’s proposed investment programs to support regional three-phase upgrades, improve reliability, improve resilience and facilitate electrification are all steps in the right direction for our region and communities.

And finally, with reference to costs of living and affordability

The grid’s performance is adding direct costs to the affordable supermarket staples that our region produces, that Australian’s rely on, and that appear in shopping trollies across the nation every week.

Getting the grid right in our region matters to every Australian.

Thank you for the opportunity to present this morning and I welcome any further questions.