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On 20 April 2016 Vector Gas Limited – owner of the Vector transmission system – was acquired by First State Funds, two infrastructure funds managed by First State Investments, known in Australia as Colonial First State Global Asset Management. Vector Gas Limited was renamed First Gas Limited (First Gas).

From time to time the Minister of Energy and Resources (the Minister) requests advice from Gas Industry Co on important issues in the gas industry.

What the Scheme does
The Scheme, introduced in 2010, is designed to achieve improved outcomes for small gas consumers using less than 10 terajoules of gas per year.

Retailer Insolvency establishes a process that we will follow in the event of a retailer insolvency and the regulatory arrangements that can be put in place to support that process.

The Switching Rules enable consumers to choose and alternate efficiently and satisfactorily between competing retailers. They provide for a centralised database, the Gas Registry, which stores essential technical parameters about every customer installation and facilitates and monitors each customer switch from initiation through to completion.

As of June 2016, the Maui and Vector pipelines came under the ownership of First Gas Limited. First Gas wishes to converge the two existing access arrangements into a single access regime.

The GTAC development work described in the Developing section has overtaken our previous work in relation to transmission pipeline access. However, many of the GTAC innovations are in response to problems identified with the MPOC and VTC access regimes.

There is no current activity in relation to this work programme. We expect the next activity will occur a year or so after First Gas introduces its new transmission access regime, which it aims to do on 1 October 2020.

Since the Security and Reliability work programme commenced there have been significant developments in the gas transmission business. From mid-2016 First Gas became the sole owner of the transmission pipelines previously owned by Maui Development Limited (MDL) and Vector Limited (Vector).