# Australian Energy Regulator (AER)

> Australia's independent national economic energy regulator, and — unexpectedly — the operator of the product-data API layer for nearly the whole Australian retail energy industry. As a designated data holder under the Competition and Consumer (Consumer Data Right) Rules 2020, the AER serves the Consumer Data Standards energy Product Reference Data endpoints anonymously: no accreditation, no API key, no signup. 79 of the 84 energy data-holder brands in the ACCC CDR Register point their productBaseUri at the AER's own host, cdr.energymadeeasy.gov.au. Verified live on 2026-07-27.

Generated by API Evangelist (https://apievangelist.com) from the AER's public surface. The AER publishes no llms.txt of its own (https://www.aer.gov.au/llms.txt and https://cdr.energymadeeasy.gov.au/llms.txt both miss).

## What is open, and what is not

- OPEN: retail plan and tariff reference data for the six jurisdictions that adopted the National Energy Customer Framework (TAS, VIC, SA, ACT, NSW, QLD). Anonymous, JSON, CORS-open, up to 1000 records per call.
- NOT HELD HERE: individual consumer usage, billing and account data. Those endpoints exist in the standard but return 404 on the AER host — retailers are the primary data holders and AEMO is the secondary data holder gateway, behind ACCC accreditation, OAuth2/OIDC and mTLS.
- NOT AN API: wholesale market statistics, performance reporting and the public registers of authorised retailers and exemptions. Published as web pages, charts and document downloads.

## APIs

- [Get Generic Plans](https://consumerdatastandardsaustralia.github.io/standards/index.html#get-generic-plans): GET https://cdr.energymadeeasy.gov.au/{brand}/cds-au/v1/energy/plans — paged summary of current plans for one retailer brand. Header `x-v: 1` is mandatory; version 1 is the only supported version.
- [Get Generic Plan Detail](https://consumerdatastandardsaustralia.github.io/standards/#cdr-energy-api_get-generic-plan-detail): GET https://cdr.energymadeeasy.gov.au/{brand}/cds-au/v1/energy/plans/{planId} — full plan contract. Header `x-v: 3`; version 2 was retired on 3 March 2025.
- [Get Status](https://consumerdatastandardsaustralia.github.io/standards/#common-apis-get-status): GET https://cdr.energymadeeasy.gov.au/{brand}/cds-au/v1/discovery/status — machine-readable operational status. Header `x-v: 1`.
- [Get Outages](https://consumerdatastandardsaustralia.github.io/standards/#common-apis-get-outages): GET https://cdr.energymadeeasy.gov.au/{brand}/cds-au/v1/discovery/outages — scheduled and current outages. Header `x-v: 1`.

## Docs

- [Energy Product Reference Data](https://www.aer.gov.au/energy-product-reference-data): the AER's developer page — operations, supported versions, headers, limits, FAQs, contact.
- [A guide to accessing Energy Product Reference Data](https://www.aer.gov.au/documents/fact-sheet-accessing-energy-product-reference-data): the getting-started fact sheet.
- [CDR Energy Retailer Base URIs and CDR Brands](https://www.aer.gov.au/documents/consumer-data-right-energy-retailer-base-uris-and-cdr-brands): the list of `{brand}` path segments.
- [Consumer Data Standards](https://consumerdatastandardsaustralia.github.io/standards/): the binding contract the AER implements, authored by the Data Standards Body.
- [ACCC CDR Register — energy brands](https://api.cdr.gov.au/cdr-register/v1/energy/data-holders/brands/summary): the machine-readable way to enumerate brands and productBaseUri values.

## Specs

- [CDR Energy API 1.36.0 (OpenAPI 3.0.3)](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/openapi/cdr-energy-api-openapi.json) — authored by the Data Standards Body, not by the AER; saved verbatim because it is the actual contract served. The AER implements 2 of its 23 operations.
- [CDR Common API 1.36.0 (OpenAPI 3.0.3)](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/openapi/cds-common-api-openapi.json) — the AER serves the 2 discovery operations.

## Calling rules an agent must follow

- Send `x-v`. Omitting it is a hard 400 with `urn:au-cds:error:cds-all:Header/Missing`. A wrong version is a 406 with `urn:au-cds:error:cds-all:Header/UnsupportedVersion`. Sending `x-min-v` with a higher `x-v` lets the server negotiate down (verified: `x-v: 5` + `x-min-v: 1` on plan detail returned 200 with `x-v: 3`).
- Resolve `{brand}` from the ACCC CDR Register, not from memory. An unknown brand returns HTTP 200 with `meta.totalRecords: 0` — never 404 — so an empty list is ambiguous.
- There is no Australia-wide query. A national picture is one paged sweep per brand.
- Page with `page` and `page-size` (default 25, maximum 1000; 1001 is a 400). Follow `links.next`; totals are in `meta.totalRecords` / `meta.totalPages`.
- Everything is read-only GET. There is no write surface and no idempotency contract.
- Correlate with the `x-fapi-interaction-id` response header and quote it to cdr-support@aer.gov.au.

## Artifacts in this repo

- [Authentication](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/authentication/aer-authentication.yml)
- [Conventions](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/conventions/aer-conventions.yml)
- [Error catalog](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/errors/aer-problem-types.yml)
- [Lifecycle and status](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/lifecycle/aer-lifecycle.yml)
- [Rate limits](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/rate-limits/aer-rate-limits.yml)
- [Conformance](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/conformance/aer-conformance.yml)
- [Data model](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/data-model/aer-data-model.yml)
- [Candidate MCP tools](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/mcp/aer-mcp.yml)
- [Agent skills](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/aer/refs/heads/main/skills/_index.yml)

## Contact

- API and data support: cdr-support@aer.gov.au
- Security contact (RFC 9116): AERWebTeam@aer.gov.au — https://www.aer.gov.au/.well-known/security.txt