06/03/2026
Being able to pay off the products your home needs to move from gas to electricity, over time and through the rates mechanism would be a game changer.
There aren’t too many options if you’re trying to avoid high food prices at the supermarket or think the big banks are making too much money. But there is now a viable alternative when it comes to energy, just as the internet provided an alternative to traditional telcos.
The big gentailers announced combined profits of $1.85b recently and then followed that up with announcements of price rises. That’s something we've become accustomed to and, as Stats NZ figures show, household energy costs (including gas) have almost tripled since 2002. Petrol is also up 130% in that time.
‘Downward pressure on prices’, as the oft-used political catchphrase goes, has clearly done bu**er all.
In an opinion piece in Newsroom, CEO Mike Casey recently compared energy to the telco industry. Communications costs have come down by around 30% in the same time - one of the few costs to decrease - primarily because technology provided another cheaper alternative (and the Government also intervened and changed the structure of the market).
“Cast your mind back a few decades. We were paying astronomical per minute rates for international phone calls, 20c per text, and huge fees per megabyte to get online. The telcos that had profited handsomely from the status quo were starting to be confronted with competition from the much cheaper internet.
They tried to protect their incumbency and did all they could to stop the technology from gaining a foothold, but customers eventually won and we now live in an era of basically unlimited texts, data and phone calls. Imagine if the telcos suggested that customers who were worried about their high bills should just have shorter calls or cut back on the data.
That’s often what it feels like when it comes to energy. We now have access to technologies that can significantly reduce bills for customers at a time when many are clearly struggling to pay them, but the incumbents advise customers to take shorter showers or only boil as much water as they need. They are told to look for savings by switching plans and retailers, or to look for slightly cheaper gas and petrol.”
We are pro-grid at Rewiring. We need a lot more renewable electricity and if too many people leave the network, those who are stuck there will be left to pay for it, as we’re seeing with the gas network. But we are also pro-customer and if electricity is too expensive the economic benefits of electrification disappear.
The price of solar has almost halved since 2002 and it is now much cheaper than grid electricity for households, even when you factor in loan repayments.
Every customer should be able to compete with those big energy landlords. But many of them need access to finance to get past the upfront cost barrier. That’s why we think Energy Impact Loans through the Ratepayer Assistance Scheme are so important if we hope to bring those costs down.
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