The work presented here leverages real-world energy and demographic data collected though household surveying conducted by CSIRO as part of the Energy Use Data Model (EUDM) project (now NEAR Program), and connects it with tariff data to estimate retail bills for a large cohort of Victorian energy consumers. Though findings should be viewed as indicative, rather than representative, given the bias in the sample set, there is sufficient diversity in the data to explore retail charges through the lenses of total energy consumption, vulnerability, solar uptake, income and gas uptake. Note that the sample is particularly biased towards older home owners, and there is a markedly higher uptake of solar PV in the sample than might be expected nationally.

Findings are based on data from approximately 1,000 Victorian homes for the year 2016 and are based on standing flat, flexible and demand tariffs from five retailers. For each household, we calculate typical flat, flexible and demand costs by overlaying the corresponding tariff structure from each retailer and averaging the resulting cost.

The Tableau presentation reflects the mean of all household costs for each tariff structure (for a given customer segment) and the Median Absolute Deviation from that mean. Costs are presented as both absolute total annual bill and total annual bill as a percentage of household income. Note that the data has been modified by Laplace noise to provide privacy guarantees. The injection of noise has a small impact on the shape and values reported and they should therefore be treated as approximations only.

Note that, for the purposes of this data, vulnerable households are considered to be those that are less likely to be able to access energy cost-saving measures and include households which are very low income, low income renters, low income with a large number of occupants, low income in an apartment, or low income with at least one old age occupant.