Telstra has delayed the launch of its retail energy business until at least FY24, due to the spike in wholesale prices.
CEO Vicki Brady said the timing for a major launch didn’t make sense in the current climate, but Telstra Energy is still key to the telco’s T25 roadmap.
“Energy is our ambition, but we have had to put that on hold while the markets are in the state they are in,” she said.
Telstra first introduced Telstra Energy during an investor presentation last November. At the time, the company was planning to launch by the end of 2022.
Since June, Telstra has had about 10,000 expressions of interest from potential customers. It promised the energy would be a “mix of fossil fuel and renewable energy”.
The telco has tipped $900 million into solar and wind farms over the past five years and is in the process of “building the final parts of the capability”, according to Brady.
The CEO says after the “dislocation in the energy market appeared with wholesale prices higher than retail prices, we made the decision not to scale up this year”.
“If we proceeded forward, we would have been in a position where we were loss-making on retail customers,” she explained.
“We would have been in a situation where we could not have put in all the financial hedges.
“That was not something obviously that was palatable or made sense.”
