How we're engaging with our community

As part of our application for a customised price-quality path, we're committed to working closely with you – our customers, stakeholders and community – to ensure our planning aligns with your needs and priorities.

To help shape the proposed investment approach outlined in our 2025 AMP Update, we gained insights from our community through our regular engagement channels, summarised below. After consulting on this to gather feedback, we then developed a draft customised price-quality path proposal.

Have your say

To have your say on our draft customised price-quality path proposal, please complete our short questionnaire. So that you can provide the best response, we recommend you first check out the consultation document outlining our draft investment plans. Please provide your feedback by 15 December 2025.

Our engagement approach

As well as completing our questionnaire or providing feedback using the contact details below, we have four engagement activity streams to ensure we use different methods and channels to reach our diverse customer, stakeholder and community sectors.

Customer Advisory Panel: A series of sessions that bring together community representatives to share insights on customer needs and provide feedback on our investment plans, supported by an independent advisor for balanced perspectives. Powerful Conversations: Focused community workshops that use a knowledge stacking framework to explore complex issues with customers. We work with a research partner to run these conversations to ensure research grade outputs and insights. Connected Conversations: Online forums and meetings with Orion business customers, industry representatives, and community organisations to foster stakeholder engagement. Community Conversations: This activity stream focuses on engaging the wider community through advertising, web and social media updates, customer surveys with our research partner, and our Community Update newsletter, delivered with The Star to around 110,000 households.

What we've heard

Through our engagement so far, we've heard that our customers’ main priorities are maintaining the reliability of our network and building its resilience, but affordability is also important. In short, you want electricity that is available when you need it, at an affordable price.

Our Customer Advisory Panel emphasised that safety, reliability, and resilience are essential now and in the future, though price increases are a key concern, particularly for vulnerable community members.

In our Powerful Conversations workshops, participants initially said that reliability and resilience were their top priorities. However, as their knowledge grew, they developed a deeper understanding of how our key investment areas are interconnected. For example, they recognised that expanding and upgrading our network capacity to support growing demand is also important to maintain the reliability of supply.

Our 2024 Customer Perceptions Survey showed that minimising outages and restoring power quickly are top priorities. Over 80% were satisfied with reliability, and overall customer satisfaction was high. Respondents also expressed a desire to see the network ready for the future, with us taking advantage of new technologies, improving efficiency, and remaining reliable.