FarmShare Tariff Trial

Overview

TasNetworks, in partnership with Aurora Energy, is conducting a 12-month trial of new billing arrangements designed to enable primary producers with their own generation to offset the electricity they produce against their consumption of energy at other connections on the same property, not just at the point of generation.

The electricity market relies on each connection to a property being metered and billed separately. For most households and businesses with just one connection this system works well. And for many primary producers, the separate billing and metering of each connection on their property works well too.

But for a primary producer with multiple connections on the same property that also has on-site generation, the individual metering and billing of each connection can prevent that business from maximising its use of the electricity it generates. This is because if a primary producer uses electricity at one connection while exporting electricity from another, even though the connections are on the same property, the separate metering and billing of each connection means the business has to pay for all the electricity it uses at the connection which is drawing power from the network.

While the primary producer might earn a feed-in tariff for any energy that they export to the grid to be used by other customers, they could potentially reduce their energy costs by more if there was a way to offset those exports of energy against the consumption of electricity at other locations on their property. This has led a number of primary producers to call for a way to balance their electricity use and generation across all connections on their property, before they have to either buy more electricity from their retailer or export the surplus energy they generate.

The trial

The trial aims to see if participants can manage their electricity use in a way that aligns their consumption of electricity with their generation of electricity, in order to reduce their energy costs.

Importantly, the trial will also test the potential for the participating primary producers to help balance the amount of energy injected into the network with localised demand for energy, to avoid the voltage rises and other issues that can be driven by exports of energy by customers at times of low demand (usually the middle of the day).

The trial will involve combining the metering data for participating connections on each property and netting off exports against consumption in 30-minute intervals.

The trial pricing arrangements (network and retail tariffs) will then be applied to the aggregated metering data by TasNetworks and Aurora Energy to generate a monthly electricity bill for each participant.

This is currently not a process that would be feasible to implement permanently because the systems used to bill customers are not designed to group multiple connections on the same property or combine multiple connections belonging to the same customer.

However, the trial’s billing arrangements do mimic the sort of arrangements that could be used in the future to apply net metering across multiple connections on the same property.

Trial term

The trial commenced on 1 July 2025 and will run for 12 months. This will provide time to properly evaluate the experimental billing arrangements and to account for seasonal variations in participants’ energy use and generation.

At the trial’s conclusion the use of aggregated net metering will be discontinued and the tariffs and billing arrangements that applied to participants’ connections before the trial will be reinstated, with each connection once again being metered and billed separately.

Trial partners

TasNetworks is the proponent of the trial, with Aurora Energy acting as the retail facilitator of the trial. Only metering data for connections on a primary production property for which Aurora Energy is the retailer will be able to be aggregated for the purposes of determining the network (and retail) charges for each primary producer participating in the trial.

Trial participants

A small community of primary producers has been recruited to test-drive the experimental FarmShare billing arrangements and help shape the network tariffs of the future.

While only a small number of participants are needed to make the trial work, it was important that we recruit a cross-section of primary producers from around the state to provide diversity in terms of the agricultural activities they are engaged in, their electricity use and the generation they have on their properties.

As a result we have primary producers participating in the trial that include vineyards, dairies, orchards and grazing properties, with a range of renewable generation on their properties that includes PV solar panels, wind turbines and even mini-hydro generation.

Apart from monitoring the impact that the trial billing arrangements have on participants’ electricity costs, participants will help TasNetworks and Aurora Energy understand the energy needs of primary producers through their insights and feedback. A key objective of the trial will be to ascertain the extent to which participants are able to manage their electricity use to align their consumption with the energy they generate.