Electricity Supply

The New South Wales electricity market helps to provide reliable and competitively priced electricity supplies to New South Wales business customers. Average electricity prices for both medium and large customers in New South Wales remain among the lowest in Australia.  New South Wales' low energy prices help to attract a high level of foreign investment into Australia, particularly energy intensive industries, resulting in the creation of jobs and economic growth for the State.

New South Wales boasts reliable, world class electricity networks that include generation, transmission and distribution to industrial and commercial customers. In 2006, New South Wales had the lowest outage frequency of all Australian States and one of the lowest outage durations. Licence conditions on New South Wales electricity distributors require mandatory standards for the planning and reliability of new and existing infrastructure in New South Wales, helping New South Wales to achieve a reliability rate consistently between 99.94% and 99.98%.  

The New South Wales Government is committed to reliable electricity supply and recognises power stations as being critical infrastructure for the future of New South Wales. In 2008, the New South Wales Government made a commitment to have all new power station applications and proposals assessed efficiently and quickly.

Average Electricity Supply Reliability and Prices for Medium and Large Customers, 2006 (1)

State/Territory Electricity Medium User (c/kWh) (2) Electricity Large User (c/kWh) (3)

Avg Customer Outage Frequency (4)

Avg Customer Outage Duration (5)
Tasmania 9.31 6.89 2.33 243.00
New South Wales (6) 9.42 8.01 1.72 186.45
Queensland (7) 9.72 8.78 3.11 632.53
Victoria 10.35 9.12 1.79 158.92
Western Australia (8) 11.35 10.55 2.85 250.00
South Australia 12.53 11.10 1.88 200.80
Northern Territory (9) 14.85 10.62 4.61 207.20



Footnotes:

1: Supply reliability measures interruptions caused by all factors, natural disasters, transmission failures and third party induced interruptions
2: Medium Business defined as >250kW 40% load
3: Large Business defined as >1000kW 40% load
4: Average measured as interruptions/customer
5: Average measured as minutes/customer/annum
6: New South Wales data on outage frequency and outage duration is inclusive of data from the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Data on prices for medium and large users is not inclusive of the ACT. 
7: Includes the full impact of Cyclone Larry
8: For South-West interconnected System only. The basis for reporting changed in 2003-04, thus figures in this year should not be compared to previous years. Western Australia data not available for 2004-05.
9: For Darwin only (2001-02).

Sources: Energy companies in each State/Territory; National Electricity Market Management Company; Australian Electricity Distributors