Unlocking the Value of CER: The Role of Retailers in Coordination

Consumer Energy Resources (CER) are becoming a defining feature of Australia’s energy system. With more than 4 million households now hosting solar panels and more than 60,000 batteries installed since July 2025 under the Australian Government’s Cheaper Home Batteries Program, CER has moved from niche adoption to mainstream participation.

This surge of household investment creates both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, rooftop solar, batteries, and electric vehicles can deliver lower bills, reduce emissions, and enhance energy security. On the other, if poorly integrated, CER can strain networks and complicate market operations.

The key to realising the promise of CER lies in retailer-led coordination. As the customer’s primary energy partner, retailers are uniquely positioned to act as agents who can both maximise customer value and translate individual household investments into system-wide benefits. This article explores how retailers are leading the coordination of CER, the frameworks needed to support their role, and the reforms required to unlock the estimated $45 billion in system benefits by 2050[i].

Retailers as the Customer’s Energy Agent

Retailers already have deep customer relationships, billing platforms, and the capability to design innovative products. Over the past 15 years, members of the Australian Energy Council (AEC) have invested heavily in CER-related offerings, including:

• Virtual Power Plants (VPPs): Aggregating rooftop solar and batteries to deliver flexibility and market services.
• Electric Vehicle (EV) charging plans: Offering dynamic tariffs, bundled charging infrastructure, and off-peak incentives.
• Bundled solar and battery packages: Simplifying adoption by combining financing, installation, and ongoing energy services.

These products demonstrate the retailer’s role as a customer agent—an intermediary who simplifies complexity, maximises the value of CER investments, and ensures households can participate in energy markets if they choose.

By comparison, networks, OEMs, and government reforms are enablers. They set the boundaries and frameworks, but it is the retailer who translates those settings into customer-facing value propositions.

From Managing Impacts to Unlocking Value

Historically, policy and regulation have treated CER as a challenge to be managed. Rooftop solar exports were capped, tariffs were redesigned to discourage excess generation, and integration efforts focused on mitigating negative impacts.

Retailers are now demonstrating that the focus can shift from managing impacts to unlocking value. Through retailer-led coordination:

• Households can reduce bills and access new sources of revenue by participating in demand response or VPP programs.
• The system benefits from reduced peak demand, improved reliability, and lower investment in poles, wires, and peaking generation.
• All customers—including those without CER—share in lower overall system costs.

An Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC)-commissioned report by Energeia that recently confirmed the scale of the opportunity: up to $45 billion in benefits by 2050 if CER is coordinated effectively. Retailers are central to realising this outcome.

Principles for Retailer-Led CER Coordination

For CER coordination to be effective and sustainable, it must be designed around customers. The AEC proposes three guiding principles for retailer-led coordination:

• Foster customer agency and choice
  • Retailers should compete to offer attractive, simple, and flexible products.
  • Customers must retain the ability to switch between providers, ensuring competition drives better outcomes.

• Deliver value for CER customers
  • Participation must provide clear financial or lifestyle benefits.
  • Transparent offerings build trust and encourage uptake.

• Share benefits with all customers
  • Retailer-led coordination should reduce system costs, lowering bills across the board.
  • This ensures equity between CER and non-CER households.

Building the Environment for Retailer Success

For retailers to deliver on their coordination role, markets, regulation, and systems need to evolve.

Standardisation and interoperability

• Technical standards for devices and controls must be harmonised to avoid fragmentation.
• Data exchange frameworks should give retailers timely, secure access to device data, enabling them to design tailored services.
• Consistent registration processes will reduce costs and promote competition across jurisdictions.

Without this standardisation, retailers face unnecessary duplication and barriers to scaling offerings nationally.

Network tariff reform

Tariff design is critical to unlocking CER flexibility. Retailers can only offer meaningful products if the underlying tariffs reward coordinated behaviour. Reform should include:

• Dynamic network pricing, aligning price signals with system needs.
• Network support payments, where retailers can aggregate CER to provide targeted local benefits.
• Standardised Dynamic Operating Envelope (DOE) approaches, reducing compliance costs and allowing retailers to offer services consistently across regions.

Partnerships and innovation

Retailers should be supported to partner with networks, OEMs, and aggregators where it delivers customer value. For example, joint VPP trials or EV smart charging schemes can spread benefits more widely. However, to ensure consistent service delivery and accountability retailers must remain the primary interface with customers.

Data and visibility

Improved visibility of both customer devices and system needs will empower retailers to innovate. Access to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s CER Data Exchange and improved consumer data rights can help retailers tailor offerings, while also giving customers confidence in the transparency of the market.

Collaboration and Partnerships Across the Supply Chain

Retailers are committed to working collaboratively with networks and other stakeholders in delivering reforms and shaping the future energy market. Collaboration across the supply chain is essential to unlocking the full value of CER for all customers.

Retailers already interact daily with distribution network service providers, installers, OEMs, and other service providers to deliver products and services to customers. Strengthening these relationships would help retailers—and other customer agents—capture and deliver additional value.

Looking forward, retailers will need to go beyond their current offerings and extend their capabilities to design and deliver innovative products that meet evolving customer needs and values. Partnering with complementary service providers will allow them to broaden their reach and enhance their coordination capabilities.

Strategic partnerships between retailers and other service providers could create a “one-stop shop” for all of a customer’s energy needs, streamlining engagement and reducing complexity. For example, a retailer might combine billing, installation, maintenance, optimisation, and coordination into a single customer offering.

Stronger supply-chain relationships will also allow retailers to differentiate themselves in the future energy market, tailoring specific products and services that meet unique customer segments while still delivering system-wide benefits.

National Policy Context

The policy environment is catching up with the reality of high CER uptake.

• The National CER Roadmap (2024) set out a strategic vision for integration.
• The 2025 consultation paper on roles and responsibilities acknowledged the importance of customer agents, although it only briefly addressed their role.
• The AEMC Pricing Review is examining tariff structures that could underpin effective coordination.

The AEC’s CER Integration Strategy complements these initiatives by focusing on what retailers need to deliver as customer agents. While networks and system operators are critical enablers, it is retailers who will design, market, and deliver the products that turn technical reforms into tangible household value.

Unlocking the $45 Billion Opportunity

Retailer-led CER coordination offers benefits across multiple dimensions:

• Reliability and security: Retailer-aggregated CER can provide fast-acting reserves, frequency response, and local network support.
• Lower costs: By reducing peak demand and deferring network augmentation, retailers help cut costs for all consumers.
• Decarbonisation: Retailer-coordinated solar, batteries, and EVs reduce emissions while accelerating Australia’s energy transition.
• Customer empowerment: Households receive clear, simple offerings that turn their individual investments into collective value.

Achieving this requires a supportive environment—standardised rules, interoperable technologies, and tariff structures that reward coordination. But the potential prize is too large to ignore.

Case studies

The recent vehicle-to-grid (V2G) initiatives from AGL and Origin provide clear examples of how retailers are leading the next phase of CER coordination. Both retailers are moving beyond traditional offerings to integrate electric vehicles into their virtual power plants and tariff platforms, transforming cars from household liabilities into flexible grid resources. By partnering with OEMs, charger manufacturers, and customers, AGL and Origin are demonstrating how retailers can act as customer agents, designing and delivering products that simplify complexity while unlocking CER value for both participants and the wider system. These initiatives highlight the retailer’s unique position in coordinating CER across technologies and supply-chain partners, reinforcing the central role retailers will play in enabling flexibility and delivering shared system benefits.

Last week, AGL and Origin each unveiled ambitious new V2G initiatives, signalling that Australia’s largest retailers are now actively moving electric vehicles into energy system participation. AGL launched what it described as a landmark residential V2G trial, partnering with carmakers Hyundai, Kia, BYD and Zeekr to provide bi-directional charging to select EV owners while assuring participants their battery warranties will not be affected. Their trial includes discounted charger installation for early participants, smart software to balance charging/discharging, and credits for export during peak demand periods. Meanwhile, Origin introduced Australia’s first V2G-enabled EV subscription bundle, in collaboration with BYD and StarCharge. This bundle offers customers a BYD Atto 3 on subscription, a StarCharge bi-directional charger, and access to free home charging under Origin’s smart-tariff platform, powered by its virtual power plant, with the aim to start the trial in 2026 for up to 50 participants.

Conclusion

Consumer Energy Resources are here to stay, and their integration is one of the most important challenges and opportunities facing the energy sector. With millions of households now invested in solar, batteries, and electric vehicles, the question is no longer whether CER matters—it is how we harness it.

The answer lies in retailer-led coordination. Retailers, acting as trusted customer agents, can aggregate CER, design tailored offerings, and deliver benefits both to CER customers and the broader system. But to do so effectively, they need supportive policy and regulatory frameworks: interoperable standards, tariff reform, improved data access, and recognition of their central role.

If these conditions are met, the outcome is transformative. Retailer-led CER coordination can unlock up to $45 billion in system benefits by 2050, delivering lower costs, improved reliability, reduced emissions, and greater customer empowerment.

CER is no longer on the edge of the system—it is part of the system now. And retailers are ready to lead the way in turning household investments into collective value.

[i] Benefit Analysis of Load-Flexibility from Consumer Energy Resources: Final Report, Energeia March 2025.