On 21 December 2018, Essential Energy submitted its revised regulatory proposal for the period, 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2024.

The AER has received a revised public lighting proposal from Essential Energy. Essential Energy has claimed confidentiality on certain information presented to the AER in its public lighting pricing model.

Stakeholders who would like to get access to the confidential information on public lighting may contact Mr Waide Elliott of Essential Energy at 0428 133 869 or email on waide [dot] elliottessentialenergy [dot] com [dot] au (Waide[dot]Elliott[at]essentialenergy[dot]com[dot]au(link sends e-mail)). Essential Energy has agreed to provide access to the confidential version of the public lighting model to selected stakeholders. The stakeholders gaining access to confidential information shall be required to sign a confidentiality undertaking.

Submissions on our draft decision and Essential Energy's revised regulatory proposal for the 2019-24 regulatory control period closed on 5 February 2019.

On 8 March 2019, we published our final decision paper for our operating expenditure productivity growth forecast review. We decided that a 0.5 per cent annual operating expenditure productivity growth rate reflects a reasonable forecast of the productivity growth a prudent and efficient distributor can make.

As flagged in our draft and final decision papers for that review, we propose to adopt this operating expenditure productivity growth forecast when making our final decision for Essential Energy's 2019-24 distribution determination. We have written to Essential Energy about the impact of our productivity growth decision on our assessment of its revised opex proposal.