Some observations about the NSW Gas market

Any new B2B market comes with challenges. And although the NSW Gas market has been contestable for some time, the B2B standards are new, especially to some of the Distributors.

For Retailers, many have been operating in other Gas markets, so picking up these standards and moving them across to cater for NSW (ok, there are some changes, like DUOS A and DUOS B but lets not get into that today!) hasn’t been a huge difference.

To me, it wasn’t a massive surprise when we began to see support calls due to the Distributor re-using Invoice numbers. It is expected that you will receive multiple files over several weeks, the “paper” invoice comes in, and you ensure all the files and the invoice totals tally up. Once this is done, we don’t expect to see this invoice assigned to new charges.

From an NBV perspective, it means these transactions sit in limbo until we write a script to fix the issue. The file was compliant but the content isn’t. Could NBV handle this better? It most certainly could. And in NBV 11.2 we will ensure that once a Package is in Open, and subsequent files are received with transactions using the same invoice number the offending files will be rejected.

We are hoping that Retailers are speaking to the relevant Distributors, encouraging them to fix their systems/processes to align with the B2B specifications.

Written by Adam Kierce.