Mr Sims said a "fair bit of the affordability story" had nothing to do with the climate debate. "The debate gets so polarised that we ignore the rest of the value chain," he said. Mr Sims said some renewable energy was extremely cheap, but it was not reliably dispatchable. "So working out the cost when you've got to make it reliably dispatchable is where the comparison gets awfully complicated," he told a CEDA lunch on Monday. Mr Sims said the National Energy Guarantee would force renewable energy to come into the system and be dispatchable.

The national energy guarantee would force electricity retailers to ensure minimum standards of emissions reduction and reliability of supply. "The RET [renewable energy target] has got a little way to go, but after 2020 I think you'll find that the subsidies to renewables, irrespective of when they generate will close to disappear and they'll have to make money out of, the new ones, from linking into the grid," Mr Sims said. Mr Sims said electricity costs had gone up and some offers to consumers were "very opaque". "A lot of people on very high standing offers and I really do think the retailers are trying to make this market as opaque as they can so they can keep people on offers that are higher than they need to be," he said. "Some people are getting lower prices as a result of deregulation, but most are probably not, and that's a worry."

Mr Sims said a lot of companies advertised electricity prices by discount, but customers often did not know the base rate. "I can easily show you products where you'll pay more on the 30 per cent discount than you will on the 10," he said. "We are looking at taking some enforcement action, but we've done it before and it hasn't seemed to change behaviour, so we think something more is required. "The best way to sell your product is to offer the highest discount, it follows the best thing to do is to push that standing offer up, and up, and up. "The problem is there's a lot of people still on that standing offer who are paying more, and more, and more."