Submission to the Victorian Consumer Energy Resources Consumer Protections Review, Directions Paper

The Clean Energy Council (CEC) welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback to the Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action’s (DEECA) Directions Paper on the Consumer Energy Resources (CER) Consumer Protections Review. 

Consumer protection is a key policy priority for the CEC, as described in our CER Roadmap “Powering Homes, Empowering People”. Consumer protection plays an important role in building consumer’s trust and therefore confidence to adopt new clean energy technologies in their homes and businesses to better manage their energy usage and costs.

We support the Victorian Government’s CER Consumer Protections Review that seeks to ensure essential energy services provided by CER are appropriately classed under a regulatory framework that enables clear and effective protections for consumers and promotes best practice in the industry. We encourage the Victorian Government to leverage an existing consumer protection framework, the New Energy Tech Consumer Code (NETCC), which would be less disruptive and lower cost to implement for both consumers and industry participants.