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1:47 pm, July 22nd, 2026 - 10 comments
Categories: election 2026, energy, greens, labour, uncategorized -
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The Green Party has launched their electricity policy called Kiwipower.
The full plan includes some big moves, with ideas we may have heard before.
They include forming Kiwipower which is a new public utility that will ensure affordable power and energy security, fill the gaps in market provision, and speed up New Zealand’s energy transition.
The Greens also agree with Labour’s policy of loans for domestic rooftop solar.
They also want $200m put into community-owned renewable energy, to enable wide benefits of shared ownership.
There needs to be a lot more detail around this to show it can work and isn’t just a subsidy for entities who could make a project stand up commercially by itself.
The Green Party energy spokesperson Scott Willis was the project manager for the Blueskin Bay turbine – which failed because the Environment Court declined its resource consent after paying too much attention from the moaning of one opponent on grounds of visual impact, landscape dominance, and proximity to neighbouring homes.
Scott is very unlikely to get back into Parliament given how far they have put him down the list, so there would be a lot of policy detail to work out without much help from caucus.
They also have a target of solar on more than half of all state houses within four years, and to put $80 million for renewable energy for Maori housing.
I’m curious about the Green manifesto silence on the future and role of Transpower since it remains the big 100% owned power entity that the state still has.
I’m also perplexed that there’s no policy on how the government as majority shareholder of 3 of 4 major generators will forego dividends if it means we Kiwis get lower power prices.
And at some point someone needs to talk about the role of the Major Users Group since they are a lobby that is gaining in power, as we have seen from the successful efforts of Fonterra and Z Energy recently to essentially write legislation for this government and attack citizens in court who oppose them.
Also the Big 4 generators gained official Commerce Commission approval to act as a cartel to form a massive pile of coal in Huntly last year, which was patently wrong on multiple fronts.
In case we forget their dominance:
If you are going to fight the power, that’s the lobby power you have to fight.
The Greens, or any combination of government that wants to improve the energy system, needs to show it has a plan to combat them all head on, not fold, and win.
No one has taken the oligopoly corporates head on since Labour broke and remade the telco market in 2006.
The Greens’ new public utility shares a lot of similarities with the Great British Energy entity that the UK Labor government has formed.
The Green platform also has a lot of similarities to the policy that the Greens and Labour jointly launched in the 2014 election.
This was called “NZ Power”, and meant dismantling the entire existing wholesale electricity market and establishing a new state-owned Pharmaac-style agency called NZPower.
This would act as a the single buyer of all wholesale electricity, purchasing power in bulk from generators and then passing the savings on to all consumers. At the time they estimated this would directly cut household power prices by 10%-14%.
At the time Labour and the Greens also promised to standardise electricity bills so consumers would receive a clear, full breakdown of their costs.
And they also, at the time, were committed to strictly enforce measures to protect people from disconnections in winter for vulnerable families.
It would have been great for Labour and the Greens to regain that sense of cooperation in the 2026 election, but there you go it’s politics.
I have no idea when the Labour electricity policy will come out, but with four months to go it’s getting a bit late for Labour to be in the front of anything.
What I know this week is that I have a $420 power bill from Contact Energy, and I live in a well insulated tiny house inhabited by two people.
I seriously want electricity bills and electricity generation public ownership to be a front and centre issue in housing and inflation.
This is a cold wet and miserable winter, and we should not have to wait until a new government is sliced and diced in the coalition negotiations before something on electricity bills and generator ownership is even started.
Denise Lee – Chair of Vector – on TV1 tonight said the Electricity Authority had been too cautious in addressing structural failings in the market, which had resulted in the need for government intervention.
She said new obligations should be applied to the four large incumbent gentailers — Contact, Genesis, Mercury and Meridian — as well as Tiwai Smelter.
"These parties have the scale and market power to meaningfully address dry-year risk."
She also called for stronger govenrnment regulation straight at the Big 4 gentailers, and criticising the Electricity Authority as too timid:
She said Entrust considered dry-year risk to be part of a broader competition problem in a market dominated by four large, incumbent gentailers.
"If we do have a genuinely competitive market, why are we seeing persistent under-investment and lack of building that generation capacity much later than we all should. That's the very definition of keeping a market perennially tight.
"There needs to be a stronger focus on reducing barriers for smaller and independent generators."
Lee said the electricity market appeared to lurch from one energy crisis to the next, which was an unacceptable situation for a country with New Zealand's natural resources.
Vector's majority shareholder says electricity market 'failing consumers'
A future govenrment that really wanted to have a crack at the gentailers would accelerate the Vector shareholding back to its origninal shareholder (now Auckland Council) from 2073 to straight after the next local election. That would seriously empower Auckland Council with their own major lines and utility company just as Dunedin Council and Christchurch Council still have.
Putting reticulation back into local public control would be a massive step a left-government could do for electricity.
And then it needs to gut and rebuild the Electricity Authority.
This is no ordinary winter for that CHair to start making strong regulatory reform noises: this is the election year winter.
I'm not convinced ownership is the core issue here. Given the financial and maintenance challenges many councils have faced—particularly around Three Waters—I'm not sure transferring electricity networks back into local government ownership would, by itself, improve outcomes.
Aurora Energy is also a useful reminder that public ownership doesn't automatically produce good investment decisions or better governance. The real question is how to create the right incentives and regulatory settings, regardless of who owns the assets.
Oh agree and Delta in Dunedin has been a difficult case.
The price regulation for lines companies is a quagmire that few commercial law teams in NZ have the capability to challenge, even if there were some enormous client willing to pay for that kind of case to go all the way.
But 100% ownership does have other very large benefits. One of which is actual direct policy control. De-corporatisation is hard and rare. But a case that is unfolding right now is the absorption of Auckland Transport into Auckland Council: the people finally get back control of a rogue utility.
Putting distribution utilities into 100% community ownership isn't going to do much about consumer pricing when the supply side, the gentailers, operate under the Companies Act and exists solely to maximise shareholder returns.
Somehow we've got to get a balance between electricity supply being a public good, as it was (kinda) before the Bradford reforms, and a vehicle to extract the maximum profit for shareholders, government and private, that it is now.
Agree that de-corporatisation is needed, but not just on the distribution side, supply side de-corporatisation is where the real benefit lies.
True in and of itself about the limits of ownership, as Res also pointed out.
Regrettably my historical memory didn't pay attention what happened to power prices when generation was just a fully integrated public entity. One has to go back to the likes of Geoff Bertram for that.
If by some miracle we get a left-leaning government in place in November, I hope voices like ours are loud and strong for the consumer. WE are getting wrinsed and everyone knows it.
Surely, there are other Acts and regulations they must adhere to, including more industry-specific obligations?
Commerce Commission and Electricity Commission give window dressing of keeping things respectable but still allow power companies to get a commercial return on investment. So values are inflated and it's bend over consumer, and the definition of consumer goes well up the chain.
It gets really complicated with the Government being the largest shareholder industry wide through it's 50% shareholding in Meridian, Genesis and Mercury, along with other holdings by government entities (ACC, Super Fund etc). So National set this up to reduce people's taxes and give them a return on the shares they bought when Key sold off half the companies.
The Green Party's proposal is probably an achievable endeavour, ideally we'd buy up 25% of Meridian and really stomp on the market. To really make progress amend the Companies Act to mandate triple bottom line reporting for essential utilities and maybe a minimum of 75% public ownership across a market in utility markets. This is going to become a major issue in the water industry once outside investment comes in to achieve government and user expectations on quality and delivery. If these utilities stay under the Companies Act as it is things will get rather messy.
The trick in any undoing of market reform (which is basically allowing private capital to gouge a return from public services) is to make it safe from further reform. Maybe a Publicly Instuited Referendum around public ownership and control of utilities could prepare the ground. It wouldn’t be hard to prepare a question that would get 75%+ and make National have to try and justify their greed.
Read the comments on the editorial page if able to.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/361047920/energy-security-will-be-election-issue
I see Andy Burnham has scrapped the 5% VAT on electricity bills in the UK, and I thought about why we couldn't do that here. I was struck by how much our politicians are still shackled by the rigidity of neoliberal ne plus ultras. GST is a great example of how market fanatics seek to regulate and fetter government, with the impracticality of varying the rate of GST being a article of faith in our MSM and business pundits. Yet the UK manages it –
20% VAT on Most goods and services.
5% on Certain health products, domestic fuel, and children's car seats.
0% Most food, children's clothing, books, and newspapers.
Certain goods and services are exempt from VAT or fall outside its scope. Common exemptions include:
Insurance services
Healthcare services
Education services
Certain financial services
These exemptions mean that no VAT is charged on these items, and businesses cannot reclaim VAT on related expenses.
The simple ability to vary or remove GST on power bills in a cost of living crisis is regarded as impoissible in this country, yet it seems very possible in other well managed democracies. Stopping the jackboot of neoliberalism stamping on the face of our politicians is a really important first step.
Such a simple idea that's good for consumers!
Like lowering petrol excise tax, you would need a serious commercial watch over whether the Big Four just slowly jacked up their prices until the VAT/GST savings had gone.