As far as the infrastructure (powerlines) is concerned, it's been dead wrong IMHO to even privatise the basic network. Maintenance of roads, power lines, gas, water, sewerage pipes ought to remain Commonwealth or State responsibility, funded by taxes and a cost component in the unit price of usage/ consumption. Separate charges for maintenance of the conduit to each dwelling would be open to abuse and inequity.
Agreed about privatisation, but the issue of fixed charges is a complex one.
In short, if fixed charges are recovered only through consumption charges then there is a very strong argument that the industry then needs to sell as much electricity as possible so as to remain in business and that means no solar grid-connect whatsoever. As an analogy, solar becomes the equivalent of a pub not only allowing BYO but allowing you to sell your alcohol to other customers whilst standing in the pub. Neither the power industry or the pub would remain in business in that case.
Personally, I'd prefer a situation where all customers just paid the fixed costs of the network as an actual fixed charge, with any concessions being a direct discount off that fixed charge as such. That way, there is no reason why the distributor needs to sell any particular volume of electricity and no need for them to worry about solar or other small scale (or large scale) distributed generation being connected to the system. So long as fixed costs are recovered via consumption charges, the industry needs volume sales of electricity to recover those costs and remain in business. Charging people directly would also put some pressure on network operators to contain costs - something they stopped doing when split off from the generation part of the industry and which has been the primary driver of soaring electricity prices to consumers.
Politically however it is very difficult. It was actually tried in Tasmania in the mid-1990's but suffice to say this was easily the most unpopular thing the Hydro has ever done and it won't be happening again anytime soon. Accepting that public relations disaster (and "disaster" is somewhat of an understatement) the only option was to pursue plan B. And so aggressive marketing of electricity sales was re-commenced - sell as much as possible in order to recover costs and keep unit rates down. Shortly after, the industry was restructured and the network handed to a new operator which, having noted the painful experience with fixed charges, ramped up the volume sales push even harder to an almost ridiculous extent at one point.
The crux of it is that so long as consumption charges are used to recover fixed costs, there will be an ongoing misconception as to the cost of bulk electricity. Literally right now, it's selling (spot rate) for between 3.428 cents per kWh (Tas) to 5.86 cents (SA).
In terms of contract rates, they vary but I will say that in Tasmania the retailer currently pays 7.936 cents /kWh for bulk supply. The new retailers are being offered bulk supply at 7.236 cents / kWh from 1st January next year and 6.331 cents / kWh from 1st July 2014.
The first reduction is a consequence of the effective ending of competition in the generation sector in Tas (Hydro having acquired the only other significant generator, AETV Power) with the second reduction being based on assumed carbon prices after 1st July 2014. The issue with competition in generation is that prices were previously jacked up so as to make it viable for AETV to be in business. With them gone, there is no reason to hold prices artificially high anymore and there has been a substantial cost saving through integration of AETV with the rest of the generation system (ie Hydro only runs the AETV plant when it can actually make money at the lower prices whereas AETV ran it flat out 24/7 - at present it's sitting idle).
Competition in generation is a complex issue. One one hand it does introduce competitive pressure to not overcharge. On the other hand it also directly increases the cost of doing business in the first place. So you end up with everyone having a higher cost of production, but an incentive to not overcharge as such. In contrast, a monopoly generator in a theoretically competitive market has (1) a lower actual cost of production since they can always run the most efficient plant and run it at optimum output levels and (2) an incentive to keep prices low enough to deter anyone else from entering that market. In a smaller market, eg WA or Tas, competition will always be a "forced" thing that won't happen naturally - prices have to be held high enough to support the operation of multiple generation companies.
One of the things to realise is that the industry has become so complex that actually generating power is almost a sideline. There is one generation company, I won't name them but they are well known and not based in Tas, where the business model is basically that of an investment bank. They make money trading financial instruments primarily, the actual generation of power being simply an input into that trading. Their activities are akin to a mining company deciding to trade metals "on paper" and simply feeding in their own mine production to that process when it suits them to do so. The scale of trading activities greatly exceeds the amount of power this company actually generates.
Anyway, I set up the new meter on my solar this evening. I've now got a nice little display sitting on the table which should show the system's output. I'll have to wait for the sun to come up tomorrow to see how it works in practice but in theory all should be well. It's correctly reading 0.000 at the moment.