To be fair to all players in the industry, the basic structure imposed by government precludes any of them operating as efficiently as they otherwise could.
So if you go to SA, as the smallest mainland state in electrical terms, then you'll find that there isn't a single retailer able to come anywhere near matching prices in Darwin or Hobart and for the record that includes Momentum (Hydro Tas) who as with the rest simply can't do it without going broke. The reasons come down to industry structure and the fundamental cost base not profits or how much the staff are being paid.
There are huge structural inefficiencies embedded at every level. Retail is one, it ends up costing $ hundreds per year for something that should be straightforward, and it's no better at the technical level.
As someone in regional Victoria just pointed out to me, they've just realised that a proposed new transmission line crosses another line and the end result is one carries power one way and the other carries it the other way. Should that not be confusing enough, the line is being built by governments as part of an associated wind farm development. Not the Victorian state government of course, they flogged off the SEC years ago, but a joint venture of the Chinese government and the Tasmanian state government via corporations owned by them (Shenhua and Hydro Tasmania respectively). Why? Well it's an investment opportunity and business is business - and it probably beats sitting in the dark from the perspective of Victorians since they're not exactly having to fight anyone else wanting to build it that's for sure. It's hard to see it as a logical process though because it isn't and nobody would sensibly pretend it was.
So it's all a big mess really and whilst profits are being made they're not the primary cause of such. Embedded inefficiency is costing far more than that.
My real concern though is engineering more than it is price. Using NSW as the example, there's 17 large generating units intended for base load operation, 16 coal and 1 gas, and of those 6 are out of service at the present time and another one has issues restricting its output. Some of that is planned maintenance yes but not all of it is that's for sure. And of course not too long ago there were 6 more of them which have since closed either totally (5) or partially closed and converted to peaking operation (1) and needless to say those who like explosives have been busily blowing them up just to be sure.
That's not good and one of these days Australians will rue the day economics took precedence over engineering. At some point it's not going to be price but actually keeping the lights on that matters indeed if it wasn't for mild weather things would be really "interesting" at the moment in NSW.
More engineering and less politicians and economic types with their ideologies that invariably fail is what's needed.
On the positive side, well those of us who have seen this whole process right from the start were effectively given a fantastic insight into a way of thinking we otherwise wouldn't have been aware of. Reverse engineer the process, apply the same logic to investing, and take the profits. So far, so good at a purely personal level.