Just Pay. Trust us.

It’s a beautiful business model for the market operator. They send you bills, you pay. There’s no dispute process. Really – there’s no dispute process. The retailer simply pays the bills that arrive. Lucky those bills are for such modest amounts…oh no, they’re not. Get a summer peak demand period – and those bills are enormous.

OK, in reality there’s a little more to the process.

Whilst there is no dispute mechanism – there is a resolution process. The retailer needs to find the problem – then make sure the problem has been resolved in the market place. Not your NMI – no problems – get MSATS updated and agreed by all. The difference will get sorted in the next time the week appears in a settlement run – the next revision. So the number 1 challenge faced by the retailer is finding the problem’s in the AEMO data in the first place.

And since you will be charged weekly, you need to be constantly on the lookout for new problems arriving each and every week. Lots of data, lots of algorithms – lots of complexity to make sure that AEMO is doing the right thing. It’s not the type of settlement you’ll try in Excel. But if you can’t spot the problems – you’ll never be able to manage one of your key risks – wholesale electricity costs from AEMO.