Why Your Home, Your Choice Matters to All Victorians: A Call for Balanced Energy Solutions

As the owners of a plumbing and gasfitting business, we’ve spent years helping homeowners make informed decisions about their energy options. Earlier this year, Dave and I had the privilege of completing a study tour of the UK, funded by the Wylie Trust Scholarship. A comprehensive report of our findings from the tour can be found here. During that tour, we explored sustainable energy options, including gas, hydrogen and the promise and challenges of electrification (including heat pump technology). The biggest takeaway? While the transition to cleaner energy is essential, we must ensure it’s done thoughtfully to avoid overwhelming homeowners with high costs and infrastructure issues.

Your Home Your Choice Campaign

This brings me to the important new campaign from the Master Plumbers Association, Your Home, Your Choice. In Victoria, we’re seeing increasing pressure to shift homes away from gas towards electrification. While this sounds great in theory, the reality on the ground is much more complex.

Electrification of homes, especially when pursued too quickly, can result in skyrocketing costs for homeowners. From our UK tour experience, we learned that households faced higher energy bills when policies pushed for fast-tracked electrification without adequate support or infrastructure. Not to mention the technical challenges in retrofitting homes not designed for this transition.

The Your Home, Your Choice campaign stands for empowering Victorian homeowners with the right to choose how they manage their energy needs. It’s about striking the balance between embracing cleaner energy and ensuring that homeowners aren’t left bearing unnecessary costs or forced into options that don’t fit their household’s needs. The push to ban gas appliances could lead to unintended consequences for many Victorian families, especially at a time when affordability is already under strain.

The Master Plumbers Association suggest that the total range of costs to convert from gas to electric can be anywhere from $11,200 – $27,200 (this includes the cost of the all-electric appliance, electrical upgrade and building modifications).

Victoria’s Gas Substitution Must be Careful and Considered

As plumbing and gasfitting professionals, we support a gradual, well-planned approach that incorporates all sustainable energy solutions, including gas. We should be exploring hybrid systems, investing in new technologies like hydrogen, and ensuring that consumers are not left behind.

We have read Victoria’s Gas Substitution Roadmap,  Victoria’s 2035 Emissions Reduction Target, Clean Economy Workforce Development Strategy 2023–2033, Australian Hydrogen Centre Summary Report, Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy and believe hydrogen needs to be a larger focus in the gas substitution roadmap to ensure the pathway to Net Zero 2050 is not just ideological, and that electrification is managed without excess costs to Victorians or causing vast network outages from overloading the grid.  

This is why we encourage everyone to stand with the Your Home, Your Choice campaign and ensure that Victorian homeowners retain the freedom to make the best energy choices for their families.

Please take a moment to read more about the campaign here and sign the petition to stop the ban on gas appliances here.

Let’s work towards a future that’s both sustainable and affordable in a realistic not idealistic way.