Gas Retail Initiatives B2B Package 1

Background

In December 2023, The Gas Retail Consultative Forum (GRCF) initiated a program to find cost-effective solutions for three specific initiatives: IN004/22, IN002/22 and IN005/24.

From April to November 2024, AEMO and participants conducted a detailed review of these issues, identifying necessary changes to existing Technical Protocols (TPs) and impacted business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Additionally, a new initiative, IN003/25, emerged during the first-round of consultation.

Note: The Gas Retail Consultative Forum (GRCF) is an industry group focused on improving the retail gas market through procedural and technological changes. Their goal is to enhance the efficiency of the market by reviewing and discussing necessary updates to Gas Retail Market Procedures (RMPs), technical protocols, and supporting documentation.

Scope

On 16 June 2025, AEMO published and approved its Notice of AEMO Decision on consultation Gas Retail Initiatives B2B Package 1 that includes the following initiatives.

1. IN004/22: Improvements to Network Tariff B2B Notification in NSW/ACT, requiring a schema change.
2. IN002/22: Updates to Gas Scheduled Read Est Sub Codes and Special Read No Access Enumerations, also requiring a schema change.
3. IN005/24: Inclusion of Contract Maximum Daily Quantity (MDQ) in Gas Retail of Last Resort (RoLR) transactions, involving customer and site details from failed retail businesses to RoLR.
4. IN003/25: Adopting the aseXML schema version 46 to align customer address fields with AS4590.1:2017 standards, which is expected to prevent large-scale future implementation costs.

Other key points to note:

• The Western Australian Gas Retail Market will remain on aseXML schema version 40 and is excluded from Package 1.
• Initiative IN005/24 requires only retailers to modify their systems, thus these changes are not included in AEMO’s BRD & FRD for Package 1 Gas Retail B2B Changes.

Listed below are the pages for the gas retail market consultation that generated these changes:

** Important note – the scope also includes the items that are described in the consultation paper under the section titled Residual Changes.

Timeline

The target effective date for these changes is 25 May 2026. The date on which the changes will take effect will be published in a separate notice (Notice of Effective Date). AEMO proposes to issue that notice before early April 2026.

Industry Engagement

On 24 September 2025, AEMO presented an information session regarding what the next steps should be in preparing for the system change.

Cutover Implementation Plan

The purpose of the cutover plan is to provide guidance for industry participants and AEMO for the Gas Retail Initiatives B2B Package 1 cutover period. The approach will be to utilise the same cutover timetable and responsibilities as the Gas Life Support in Q4 2021 and to incorporate some learnings.

Technical Requirements

The functional specifications for the exchange of information between participants for Gas Retail Initiatives Package 1 B2B changes are described in the Technical Protocols (TP) for each jurisdiction. The Technical Protocols operating in Victoria, Queensland, and NSW/ACT are called Gas Industry Protocol (GIP) and the Technical Protocols operating in South Australia are called the Specification Pack (SP). The GIP and SP documents contain several artefacts (i.e. further technical documents to which they refer), that set out how transactions are to be used between participants.

The link below is a zip file that contains the marked up technical protocols (GIP and SP) with the changes for the Gas Retail Initiatives B2B Package 1 changes.

Residual Changes

The link below is the list residual changes for Package 1 B2B changes. In terms of system builds, the items in this document should be considered along with the approved amendments (See Attachment A – Updated AEMO Technical Protocols).

Consultation on the above-mentioned residual changes commenced on the 6 February 2026. The consultation papers for these changes can be found here.

aseXML schema version r46

On the effective date, AEMO and East Coast Retail Markets to adopt r46 aseXML schema. A summary of the changes are:

• AEMO Procedural enforcement of updated/new Gas Scheduled Read Est Sub Codes and Special Read No Access Enumerations * r45 Schema change.
• AEMO Procedural enforcement of new Network Tariff codes in NSW *r45 Schema change.
• No AEMO Procedural enforcement of Customer Address field/enumeration updates introduced in r42 and r46 aseXML schema versions.

Re-certification

Section 3.5 of the Gas FRC B2B Connectivity Testing and System Certification (VIC, QLD, SA and NSW/ACT) document contains information about re-certification. This section also contains a list of various types of changes AEMO and participants may make to their Gas Retail Market systems. AEMO recommends that if any of various types of changes in that list, corresponds to the changes your organisation intends to make, then your organisation should request re-certification. Ultimately it is up to each participant to ensure that their certification remains valid after any configuration changes, such as those mentioned in the list. Further information about the certification / re-certification is described in the Gas FRC B2B Connectivity Testing and System Certification document.

AEMO certification responder

In relation to addressing attributes, AEMO has added some additional logic checks to the certification responders as part of the r46 configuration. They relate to maximum field length for certain address attributes. Further details are described in the document below.

Further information

The first point of contact for assistance is your organisations’ GRCF representative who can provide guidance on this project.

If there are questions or concerns that your organisation’s GRCF representative is unable to resolve, please email [email protected]