Balancing act: project report on pruning gas networks

Looking at repurposing gas pipeline expenditure to help low-income households to electrify.

At a glance

When the time comes to replace the gas pipes on your street, would you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new pipes, or would you rather have that money (or some of it) put towards switching homes, especially for those who cannot afford it, from gas to all-electric?

This report provides insights from social, economic and desktop research conducted as part of Balancing Act, a project led by BSL with commissioned research by Energeia and researchers from the Life Course Centre at the University of Melbourne, and funded by Energy Consumers Australia (ECA).

Dive deeper

While gas is widely used in Australian homes, phasing it out is essential to meet our climate targets. It is likely that gas networks – tens of thousands of kilometres of pipes and other infrastructure – will shrink and eventually become largely redundant as households switch to electric-only.

We recommend governments and regulators develop and implement pruning, prioritising fully funded upgrades for low-income households. Funding for these upgrades should come at least partly from avoided gas replacement spending; if this increases the cost above business as usual, government should fund the gap (or more) to avoid increasing the burden on remaining gas users. Implementing pruning could make the gas transition cheaper and fairer by lowering its overall cost and shifting the cost away from households facing disadvantage.

Recommendations

Ways pruning should be implemented in Australia:

• Governments and regulators should develop and operationalise a process to avoid further gas network spending where it can be avoided through electrification, in line with our implementation considerations described above.
• Regulators should undertake a review of the availability of gas network information with a view to increasing transparency.

Complementary gas network policy:

• Regulators should initiate a review of gas network planning processes to make them fit for purpose for a declining gas network, considering scenarios for a gas network death spiral and for non-network solutions to replacement expenditure.
• State/territory governments should ban new home gas connections as soon as possible where this has not already occurred.
• State/territory governments should investigate banning new commercial connections where viable.
• State/territory governments should phase out the sale of new gas appliances to existing homes.