The Electricity Network Regulation Review is an AEMC review of the economic rules that govern network businesses: the poles, wires and transmission that carry electricity to a connection point, rather than the plants that generate it. Package 1, which closed earlier this year, asked what services networks should provide in a regulated capacity. Package 2 asks how the regulation of those services should work, and its consultation paper was published on 13 August 2026.

For anyone in the Hunter watching transmission build-out, connection queues and network charges, this is the framework underneath all of it.

The three questions

The AEMC has, in its own words, identified three key elements for consultation.

  • The revenue determination process. Whether the process for setting a network’s regulated revenue for a forward period is efficient, supports prudent and efficient expenditure proposals, and ensures consumer views are appropriately reflected.
  • Incentives. Whether the framework aligns network businesses’ decisions and behaviours with consumers’ long-term interests. The paper notes incentives can support innovation, efficient use of the network, or work to level the choice between capital and operating expenditure solutions.
  • Risk allocation and compensation. How risks are allocated between network businesses and consumers, and how those businesses are compensated for the risks they bear.

The third is the one to watch. A network that carries more risk needs a higher return to justify the investment, and that return is paid by customers. A network that carries less risk is cheaper to fund, and the risk sits with consumers instead. There is no arrangement where the risk simply disappears, and Package 2 is the venue where that trade is being argued.

The number in the paper worth knowing

The process of setting network revenue is itself expensive, and the paper puts a figure on it. In the most recent regulatory determination cycle, transmission and distribution businesses spent an estimated $190 million on a combined basis preparing regulatory proposals, engaging with customers and stakeholders, and taking part in the stages of the determination process.

We would rather quote the AEMC’s own framing of that number than sharpen it, because the paper is careful about it in a way that a headline would not be. Those costs, it says, are small relative to NSP’s overall operating expenditure (collectively around $5.13 billion in 2025) but still matter as these costs are ultimately borne by consumers.

Both halves are the point. On our arithmetic, $190 million is about 3.7 per cent of a single year of operating expenditure across the sector, so this is not a story about a process that has eaten the industry. It is a story about a process that is, in the paper’s own word, resource-intensive, can take several years, and is paid for by the people receiving the bills. Whether that is good value is exactly what the AEMC is asking.

What this is not

Two clarifications, because the naming here is genuinely confusing and we nearly tripped on it.

First, ENRR Package 2 is not the same thing as Improving the NEM access standards, Package 2. That is a separate AEMC rule change, about the technical standards generators must meet to connect, and it reached a draft determination in March. Same commission, same word, different subject entirely.

Second, this consultation paper is a set of questions, not a proposal. Nothing here is a decision, a draft rule or a change to what anyone pays. The Review has been planned as a six-month sprint concluding at the end of 2026, so the decisions come later and this is the stage where the framing gets set.

How to actually have a say

Unlike most of the documents we read for this masthead, this one is still open. Written submissions must be lodged with the Commission by 24 September 2026 through the AEMC website. The consultation paper carries the specific questions the Commission wants answered, which is the practical way in: responding to a numbered question is more useful to a review than a general objection, and it is what the process is built to receive.

If you connect to the network as a business, a large customer, or a generator waiting in a queue, the risk allocation section is where your experience is evidence rather than opinion.

Methodology and what we have not read. This piece is built on the Package 2 consultation paper and its information sheet, both published by the AEMC on 13 August 2026 and downloaded and read on 20 August 2026. Quoted words are verbatim from those documents. We have read the information sheet in full and the consultation paper in part: it runs to 123 pages, and we have not worked through every question or the detailed discussion behind each of the three elements. The 3.7 per cent figure below is our own arithmetic on the two figures the AEMC gives, not a number the paper states. We have not read the Package 1 submissions, of which there are more than fifty, including ones from Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy that are directly relevant to this region and are the obvious next read on this thread. Nothing here characterises what any party has argued.