Regulatory issues facing community PV and lessons learned from telecommunications

4 August 2016 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
LG03, Tyree Energy Technologies Building (TETB)

Abstract

The implementation of community PV creates regulatory as well as technical issues. Networked industries ranging from energy through transport to telecommunications have been subject to access regimes at the wholesale level. Community PV creates a new access challenge at the retail or consumer level. This presentation compares these challenges with regulatory regimes that have been established in telecommunications in Australia and elsewhere. It suggests that many of the potential access models have analogues in regulatory regimes in other networked industry sectors. The talk also reviews the argument put by incumbents and entrants in those sectors and the associated counter-arguments. The presentation will conclude with a question and answer session.

About Rob Nicholls

Dr Rob Nicholls is a lecturer in business law at the UNSW Business School and is a research fellow at the Centre for Law, Markets and Regulation. His research interests encompass competition law and policy as well as the regulation of networked industries and the financial services sector. Before this appointment, Rob was a research fellow at the Centre for International Finance and Regulation where he is investigated the intersection of competition law and financial services regulation and at Swinburne University of Technology where he researched spectrum management policy. He is also a visiting fellow at UTS Sydney Law. Rob has had a thirty-year career concentrating on competition, regulation and governance, particularly in networked industries. His first degree was in electronics engineering and he has worked for major corporates, in turnarounds and start-ups. Before moving to academia, he worked for the ACCC and spent twelve years as a client-facing consultant at Gilbert + Tobin. Rob is an accredited mediator at the Independent Telecommunications Adjudicator in a regime established to deal with wholesale disputes arising over both legacy services and migration to the NBN. He is also a member of the NBN arbitration pool.