Jemena customer engagement and revenue proposal

RPS worked with Jemena Gas Networks on its 2019 Revenue Proposal, engaging with gas end-users to understand their long-term interests and priorities.

Solution

Developing a program that embeds internationally recognised International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) engagement principles, our team designed a deliberative engagement process that involved representative samples of Jemena’s metropolitan and regional customers.

Our team ran two consecutive day-long forums in Sydney and regional NSW to understand how customers want to be engaged and help shape key consumer-facing documentation. Five ‘mini-publics’ in different metropolitan and regional locations were also convened for three day-long meetings over a six-month period, allowing customers to provide informed, considered feedback on the critical questions addressed by the Revenue Proposal.

RPS also facilitated engagement through capacity-building study circles with vulnerable customers including workshops with people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, and engagement with residents of retirement communities, to understand the challenges of rising energy costs on people with fixed incomes.

This representative and deliberative approach helped us to gather considered, informed feedback from consumers on the critical questions addressed by the Revenue Proposal. It helped Jemena to demonstrate to the AER how it will meet the long-term interests of customers during the regulatory pricing period, and the work it has done to investigate and understand these interests in partnership with customers.