The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) is hoping to appoint a digital transformation director to help expand its monitoring of the gas and electricity sector by using data and growing its digital capabilities.
The new digital transformation director will sit in AER’s IT and data governance branch and report to AER’s chief data strategist Hrishikesh Desai, who is responsible for implementing AER’s data strategy.
According to the job posting, the successful candidate will be “responsible for the development and implementation of the AER’s digital transformation proposal and program."
“The program seeks to transform AER’s ICT and data systems by investing into modern, secure and scalable digital capabilities," it states.
“This will allow the AER to effectively monitor and regulate the market and perform its regulatory role effectively and efficiently.”
Creating a digital transformation director is AER's latest investment in its ICT and data strategies, which have helped enable its increased compliance actions.
According to the regulator’s most recent corporate plan [pdf], the data strategy “increases systemisation and reduces the opportunity for human error,”; one of its core aims is “improving our market surveillance capability.”
“We will develop a business case (seeking funding) to improve AER’s data handling, storage and use via implementation of the data strategy,” the 2021-22 corporate plan [pdf] reads.
The watchdog is cracking down harder on wholesale and retail markets; last month it fined Stanwell, Incitec and EnergyAustralia and filed court proceedings against Jemena and AGL.
Information exchange
To further its plans to make better use of industry data, AER is preparing to launch a streamlined, web-based platform for exchanging information with electricity network and gas pipeline businesses by December 2024.
The regulator sought feedback from the sectors in a recently released consultation paper on the initiative.
It also presented “case studies where technology platforms are already operating for data and information exchange,” at a workshop about the project in November.
AER's proposals for the ‘future technology platforms’ project include “data validation and quality check prior and during ingestion,” and “cloud-based…centrally stored network data with data governance and management principles applied.”
The watchdog also said last year that it had already achieved some successes in making compliance reporting more efficient for the distribution and transmission sector.
For example, AER has encouraged 50 percent of electricity network businesses to submit their annual regulatory information notices (RIN) via a portal, which enables automated data collection and analysis.
The regulator has said that some businesses currently spend millions of dollars and hundreds of hours fulfilling their reporting obligations via Excel spreadsheets.
