on the backburner until at least the middle of next year. Chief executive Vicki Brady said it did not make sense to scale up with the “dislocation” between wholesale and retail prices crunching margins and squeezing smaller operators out.
“If we proceeded forward, we would have been in a position where we were loss making on retail customers,” Ms Brady said.It is the latest example of the volatility that has engulfed the local energy market for the past few months. As wholesale prices jumped, Bell Potter and Macquariefor energy futures in October, thereby limiting the ability of some retailers to properly hedge against these shocks.
The company had planned to launch Telstra Energy by the end of this year, according to an investor presentation from last November. “To enter this business you obviously got to have very well thought through risk management and financial hedging in place. So if we had entered it we probably would have had to assess where we were at and the size of the financial protections in place. We might have had to slow down,” she said.